What is Location Visitation Attribution (LVA) and Why Does It Matter?

What’s the goal of your advertising campaign? For most brick-and-mortar businesses, the answer is to get customers through the door, but historically, this type of attribution has been a challenge.

Digital ad reporting is limited to metrics like click through rate and reach because the native platforms have no way of connecting online and offline audience behavior. Location visitation attribution analysis overcomes these challenges and helps you determine how successfully your advertising campaigns drive visits.

Location Visitation Attribution (LVA) Defined

Location visitation attribution (LVA), or footfall attribution, measures the effectiveness of advertising campaigns in driving visits to specific brick-and-mortar locations, otherwise referred to as Points of Interest (POI). LVA works by considering the effect a campaign has on two groups of consumers with similar audience and/or behavioral characteristics: the Exposed Group (EG) and the Control Group (CG).

EG refers to the group of consumers that were exposed to the ad campaign while CG is a lookalike group of individuals not exposed to the campaign. Once the CG and EG are identified, a campaign is executed targeting the users in the EG while CG devices remain unexposed. Subsequently, the visitation rates across EG and CG are measured and compared, using the Visitation Rate (VR) metric to evaluate the impact of an advertising campaign.

Location Visitation Attribution Benefits & Use Cases

An LVA analysis generates insights that help brands connect with customers and provide the customized marketing experience that modern audiences expect.

• More effective ad spend: An LVA report can help you identify ad campaigns that aren’t driving visits, so you can either reduce or reallocate your advertising budget accordingly.
• Competitor analysis: How do you know if your advertising initiatives successfully differentiate you from competition? An LVA study that compares data between your customers and your competitors’ customers can help you measure how well your ads influence your competitors’ audience.
• Reveal customer demographics and behavior: Learn who sees and interacts with your ads and insights about POI visitation history.

Depending on the design of the study, and location-based attribution may also be described as cross channel attribution, foot traffic attribution, or footfall measurement. To help you get a better idea, here are some specific examples.

Use Case 1: Helping A Multinational Retailer Increase Its Competitive Edge

A multinational grocery and retail brand wanted to gain market share by driving foot traffic from their top competitor to their stores. To do so, the retailer

• Ran a digital ad aimed at defined custom target segments using Mobilewalla POI data
• Measured its offline impact through a Mobilewalla LVA study.

The LVA study reflected over 520% visitation uplift from the brand’s existing customers and over 880% uplift from the competitor’s customers, which means they were able to attract more of their competitor’s customers to their stores after being exposed to the ad.

Mobilewalla’s footfall reporting also uncovered demographic, behavioral and visitation trends that represented a competitive edge.

Use Case 2: Empowering a Large Telco Brand To Reach More High Value Customers

A large telco brand wanted to target competitors’ high value customers (HVC) with a campaign related to their latest offering. To understand the campaign’s effectiveness, they turned to Mobilewalla’s store visitation attribution solution.

Mobilewalla identified an HVC audience from our repository of mobile data and compared store visits between exposed and unexposed groups. The location-based attribution study revealed a 350+% visitation uplift, the equivalent of 20,000+ unique visits to their stores during the campaign period.

Beyond calculating uplift, Mobilewalla also delivered audience insights about visitors to their stores that were exposed to ads – from demography (age, gender and income level) to distance traveled, time of visit and more.

More LVA Case Studies

Looking for further reading? Learn more in these full-length case studies:

Don’t Waste Your Ad Investment

Reigning in your advertising budget is difficult if you don’t know what’s working. Scaling back the wrong campaign might save you money in the short term, but result in a significant hit to your bottom line.

Don’t rely on limited digital attribution statistics or unreliable customer reporting, use a Mobilewalla LVA study to see how well your ad campaigns drive store visits. With our repository of high-quality demographic, behavioral and location data, we’re uniquely positioned to connect digital ad exposure with real-life activity.

Make more informed decisions with Mobilewalla

Talk to one of our data experts today to tackle your brand’s acquisition questions with Location Visitation Attribution.