TL;DR — In a head-to-head week against an incumbent media partner, an agency-led campaign on El Toro’s Venue Replay delivered 26,328 net-new shoppers vs. 5,694 for the competitor (4.6x more) at $0.31 per store visit vs. $0.44 (30% lower). The grocery brand expanded the program to additional locations, and the agency rolled the same approach out to other clients.
For grocery brands, weekly circular spend is one of the largest line items in the marketing budget, and one of the hardest to prove ROI against. Most digital circular partners can show impressions, clicks, and time-on-page. Very few can answer the question that actually matters to a store operator: “Did that ad bring a new household into my aisles, or did I just remarket to the same loyal shopper for the fifth time this month?”
That’s the question a national grocery chain set out to answer when their agency partnered with El Toro. The result was a one-week test that reset the bar for what their digital circular program should deliver, and triggered an expansion across more stores and more brands.
The Challenge: Reaching New Shoppers, Not Just the Same Loyal Ones
The grocery brand had been running a digital weekly circular program for some time with an incumbent media partner. Engagement looked fine on paper; clicks, time on circular, view counts. But same-store sales growth and new-customer acquisition were softer than the team wanted, and leadership had a hypothesis: the existing program was largely re-reaching the chain’s existing loyalty base instead of pulling in net-new households from the surrounding trade area.
The agency was tasked with testing a different approach. The criteria:
- A new audience strategy. Reach households the chain wasn’t already converting, including shoppers actively visiting competing grocery stores.
- Verified store visit measurement. Show whether digital ad exposure translated into real foot traffic, by household.
A one-week proof point. Run a head-to-head against the incumbent program, with comparable budgets and creative, and let the data decide.
The Solution: Venue Replay + Household-Level IP Targeting
El Toro and the agency built the test around Venue Replay, El Toro’s location-based targeting product. Unlike geofencing, which infers a device’s location from cell-tower triangulation or coarse mobile signals, Venue Replay identifies the actual IP-mapped households of devices observed at a specific physical venue, then serves digital ads to those households across CTV, display, and other channels.
For this campaign, the audience strategy did two things at once:
- Conquested competitor shoppers. Venue Replay built audiences from devices observed at competing grocery stores in the chain’s trade area. Those households then received the client’s weekly digital circular.
- Targeted the chain’s own trade area. A second audience reached households that had not visited the client’s stores in the prior 30 days, true top-of-funnel prospects.
Because Venue Replay resolves to households (not anonymous mobile IDs), the campaign could be tied back to verified in-store visits at the household level using El Toro’s store visit attribution.
The infographic below summarizes the head-to-head week between the El Toro program and the incumbent competitor:
The Results: 4.6x More Net-New Shoppers at a 30% Lower Cost Per Visit
In a single week, with comparable spend and creative, El Toro outperformed the incumbent on every measured metric:
- Net-new shoppers: 26,328 vs. 5,694 — a 4.6x difference. These are households driven into the store with zero prior visits in the previous 30 days.
- Total store visits (30 days): 30,786 vs. 22,921 — 34% more verified foot traffic. 86% of El Toro’s attributed visits came from net-new households, compared with just 25% for the competitor.
- Cost per store visit: $0.31 vs. $0.44 — 30% lower, meaning every advertising dollar produced more shoppers in the aisles.
- Avg. time on the weekly circular: 03:07 vs. 02:38 — 3x the national grocery circular benchmark, and 18% longer than the competitor’s experience.
- Click-through rate: 0.85% vs. 0.64% — 33% higher engagement on the same kind of creative.
- Shopper impressions: 703,481 vs. 648,891 and clicks: 5,947 vs. 4,178 — more reach and more engagement.
The story underneath those numbers is the 86% vs. 25% net-new mix. The competitor’s program was producing fine-looking metrics, but the visits it drove were mostly from households the chain was already converting. El Toro’s program was opening the top of the funnel, bringing first-time shoppers into the aisles, where the brand had a chance to win them as repeat customers.
Why El Toro’s Technology Outperformed
The performance gap wasn’t a creative problem or a budget problem, it was an audience problem, and that’s where El Toro’s underlying technology earns the difference.
IP-based targeting at the household level. Most “household targeting” in digital advertising is probabilistic, modeled from device graphs, cookies, or mobile IDs. El Toro’s IP Targeting platform resolves directly to physical household IPs, so a campaign reaches the address, not a guessed-at audience segment. That precision matters most when the goal is net-new acquisition, because it lets a campaign explicitly exclude the brand’s existing customer file and explicitly include competitor visitors.
Venue Replay over geofencing. Geofences are fast to set up, but they’re noisy, they pick up commuters, delivery drivers, and people in adjacent businesses. Venue Replay observes devices at the venue and resolves them to the actual household, which yields a smaller, cleaner audience that converts at a higher rate.
Verified store visit attribution. El Toro doesn’t measure success at the panel or modeled level, it measures by tying ad-exposed households to verified in-store visits. That’s why the case study can split the 30,786 visits into “0 prior” / “1–3 prior” / “4+ prior” buckets, which is the question grocery operators actually want answered.
Multi-channel delivery on a single audience. The same household-resolved audience can be reached on connected TV, display, online video, and other channels through a single platform, without rebuilding the audience for each surface. For a weekly cadence like a grocery circular, that’s the difference between a campaign that runs and a campaign that compounds.
What Happened Next: Expansion Across Stores and Brands
The one-week test wasn’t the end of the program, it was the start of it.
After reviewing the results, the grocery brand expanded the El Toro program to additional store locations, deepening the footprint within the trade areas where the model was already working and adding new markets where the chain wanted to drive trial. The agency, meanwhile, took the same playbook, Venue Replay-led conquesting plus household-level retargeting plus store visit attribution, and rolled it out to additional client brands as a repeatable approach.
That’s the part of the story that often gets buried in case studies: the test worked, the client kept the partnership, and the agency built a new product offering on top of it. A 7-day proof point became a multi-store, multi-brand pattern.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Venue Replay?
Venue Replay is El Toro’s location-based audience product. It identifies the IP-resolved households of devices observed at a specific physical venue, for example, a competing grocery store, and lets advertisers reach those households with targeted digital ads across CTV, display, and other channels. It’s a more precise alternative to geofencing because it resolves to households rather than approximate device locations.
How is El Toro different from a typical digital circular partner?
Most digital circular partners measure engagement with the circular itself — views, clicks, time on page. El Toro layers household-level IP targeting and verified store visit attribution on top, so a brand can see which households were exposed to the ad and which of those households actually walked into the store. That makes it possible to optimize the program for net-new shoppers, not just engaged ones.
Can El Toro target competitor grocery store shoppers?
Yes. Venue Replay can build an audience from devices observed at competing grocery stores in a defined trade area, resolve those devices to households, and serve the brand’s creative to those households across digital channels. This is sometimes called “competitor conquesting.”
How does El Toro measure store visits?
El Toro ties ad-exposed households to verified in-store visits using a combination of IP-resolved household data and venue observation. Visit data is reported by household and segmented by recency, for example, households with 0, 1–3, or 4+ prior visits in the past 30 days, so a brand can see whether ad spend is driving net-new traffic or re-reaching existing customers.
How quickly can a grocery brand stand up a campaign like this?
The case study above ran in one week against an incumbent comparison. New campaigns can typically be planned, audience-built, and launched within a similar timeframe, depending on creative readiness and the size of the trade area. Expansion to additional stores can be done without rebuilding the underlying audience model.
Is this a fit for brands beyond grocery?
Yes. The same household-level IP targeting, Venue Replay audience-building, and store visit attribution approach is used across retail, automotive, QSR, health and wellness, and any other category where the goal is driving verified physical visits to a specific location.
Fill Your Aisles With Net-New Shoppers
If your weekly circular spend is producing engagement but not first-time shoppers, the audience strategy — not the creative — is usually the place to look.