Submitter
Steven Rosenblatt, President
Company
Foursquare
Industry
Advertising Technology
Business Challenge
As Foursquare grew its digital advertising business, the company found many clients facing a challenge around real world measurement, specifically how to tie success of digital advertising campaigns to in-person store visits.
Analytics Solution
In February, Foursquare launched Attribution, an analytics-based solution that measures the success of any digital ad campaign in the real world in real time, allowing advertisers to optimize campaigns mid-stream.
Foursquare leverages data from over 50 million monthly active users on Foursquare and Swarm to help advertisers better understand their influence on target audiences. Ad campaigns that run with Attribution can measure how effective digital ads are at driving foot traffic into stores compared to a control group that has not been shown a particular ad. Attribution measures incremental lift; behavior of new vs. lapsed customers; as well as chain, competitor, category and taste affinities.
Impact
In the first few months after launching Attribution, Foursquare quickly signed over 55 different brands, publishers, agencies and programmatic partners. Attribution’s real-time data has helped brands both large and small to measure how effectively they can reach customers with their brands or platforms.
Foursquare has seen the success of these campaigns and Attribution’s insight firsthand. One example is a campaign with Flipboard that used Attribution to measure the performance of ads for a major national retail brand. Through this test, Flipboard was able to demonstrate that the brand’s ads drove 12% incremental lift in visits to retail locations within a week.
Attribution has had a clear impact on Foursquare, further defining the company’s role in the advertising technology industry and deepening the company’s use of meaningful location intelligence and analytics.