Mike Duke, CEO of Walmart, recently said: “The biggest opportunity we have is winning the intersection between physical and digital retail around the world.”
Who are your customers? How do they shop? Ask any retailer and you’ll probably get an amalgamation of several consumer journeys.
The common understanding is that the consumer path to purchase isn’t a linear journey; it’s now a tornado of people bouncing between screens and stores to make their decisions – and mobile’s role is a core function throughout. In fact, our most recent annual Mobile Path to Purchase report in the UK and US revealed that mobile has overtaken desktop use as a research tool for purchases.
In addition to this, 42% of mobile users in the survey considered mobile the most important resource in their purchase process, while one-third of mobile shoppers turn to mobile exclusively for purchases.
This path doesn’t stop online. While using mobile and desktops throughout the purchase journey, 52% of respondents reported visiting a physical store and 64% completed their purchase offline.
While the purchase journey is more complicated than ever, attribution has always been a problem. John Wanamaker, a famous American merchant who passed away in 1922, may just be the most renowned unknown character in advertising. His most famous quote is still used to describe the challenges of advertising measurement in the present day: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”
We can see a microcosm of the measurement quandary in one of the newest advertising channels: mobile. Though consumers are spending more time on mobile than ever before, marketers have often hesitated to spend big money here as the medium is still relatively new and is viewed as lacking the metrics and measurements to back up spending.
In online advertising we had cookies, the ingenious bit of tracking code, and the click-through-rate (CTR), which allows marketers to attribute clicks and sales to an IP address. But these tactics don’t translate to mobile.
Clicks are a poor measure. Our research says that when it comes to mobile advertising, accidental clicks on the smaller screen are far more common: up to 40% of the time.
So if clicks aren’t the end game with mobile, what is? The answer goes beyond the click: what are the secondary actions that people take after engaging with an ad? Often, that’s a search for products on a retailer’s website, or looking up store hours or directions. As the mobile device is always with you, the location data it contains makes it more useful than an online cookie.
The digital device signals physical locations, such as store visits, to actually connect whether a person who viewed the ad for a discounted coffee after 3pm actually went to the café anytime. This data connects whether a person who viewed an ad on a device actually visited a business location or point of interest.
With a path to purchase that often looks more like a chaotic tornado, location may well just be the great connector between online activity and off. Maybe we just need a tastier name to finally look beyond cookies and clicks.
To find out more about the potential of location marketing, get in touch with the xAd team at contactus@xad.com
This advertisement feature is brought to you by xAd, sponsors of the Guardian Media Network’s Future of advertising hub.
