Retail Attribution In The Digital Space

The retail industry has undergone many changes in the past decade. With the rise of digital shopping, companies are constantly looking for ways of proving retail attribution offline and online. The ability to have increased accountability for every ad dollar spent is something that’s becoming more prevalent among all retail companies.

Email marketing, display ads, search engine marketing, social media ads, influencers; consumers are always exposed to an advertisement of some form whenever they look at a screen. This constant contact keeps consumers at some point in the sales funnel indefinitely. A problem arises in this process when it comes to retail attribution though. It is not only hard to identify what affected a consumer to convert, but there’s no unique identifier for each consumer across platforms a majority of the time.

While some of these platforms have a way to measure campaign performance, not all of them directly show sales attribution. Companies can monitor campaigns overall to some extent. However, these tend to not be granular to the point of saying, this person saw an ad and they ended up converting. Many of the main platforms operate this way, while overall results are provided, there’s no way to see which individuals were truly affected and where.

Since offline sales are still the majority in the retail industry, retail attribution is even harder to accomplish. There isn’t a way for most companies to qualify whether or not a consumer saw an ad and then purchased in the store because of it. Even for online campaigns, justifying marketing spend isn’t always clear.

El Toro aims to fix these problems within the retail industry. All of our targeting methods are based on a physical address, meaning we clearly account for every sale we effect. Our technology allows us to match physical addresses to IP addresses. All of the houses we target are measured for campaign performance, proving retail attribution.

In a recent campaign run with a major player in the sneaker industry, we managed to prove this, generating significant results. By separating consumers from their CRM list into a target and control group, we measured the impact of our targeted ads. From a conservative ad spend and short campaign duration, we saw the following results:

Each of those sales came from a household El Toro delivered ads to. By focusing on this one customer identifier, we are able to prove retail attribution for online and offline sales. This has proved valuable across all industries and is currently the best way for companies to prove retail attribution from advertising spend.