Tracking Sales Uplift: Advertiser’s Dream Come True?
September 25th, 2007 Nurlan Urazbaev
James Bickers published this article on digitalsignagetoday.com about measuring the effectiveness of advertising campaigns in retail. Following the solid return-on-the-advertising achieved by ‘pay-per-click’ and e-commerce, marketers today want the same level of accountability from other media. This is one of the reasons traditional network TV spots are going out of favor: they are expensive and it’s hard to prove that anyone watched them at all.
Potentially, digital signage in retail can offer the same or even higher accountability than online advertising. Once the customers are in the store, they have a broader choice of goods to buy and they are more responsive to relevant product info because they are already in the purchasing mode. So, it seems obvious that you should be able to look at the digital signage campaign schedules and content data and see if the campaign had any effect on the Point-of-sale transactions.
Sounds easy? Not quite, say the experts interviewed: Bill Gerba, June Peoples and Dick Trask. There are challenges to overcome, such as: correlation of large volumes of non-standardized data, reluctance on the part of some retailers to grant access to their POS reports and the need to integrate digital signage in the overall in-store marketing strategy.
But still, I would say, it’s not rocket science… and both databases are digital after all. I think it’s fair to expect someone to come in and make it easy to track sales uplift against digital signage campaigns within the next 2-3 years. DS-IQ seems to be firmly in the lead in this field. I wonder why nobody else is claiming this niche opportunity.
Entry Filed under: Digital Signage ROI, The Big Picture, Toys and Technologies, Uncategorized
3 Comments Add your own
1. Daniel Parisien | September 25th, 2007 at 10:45 pm
Correlating proof of play to point of sale data is specifically useful for tracking the effectiveness of a particular ad creative vs. alternative versions which allows you to split test certain content strategies versus others. I believe this tool will allow digital signage as a medium to accelerate its maturation since we will have direct scientific results to our experiments.
All this being said, you do not need to correlate proof of play data to point of sales data to calculate direct ROI. Vendors are already calculating ROI for their static in-store advertising spend. In this case, proof of play logs are simply used as a proof of ad delivery, e.g. in the case of a campaign performance report.
Longer term, I anticipate seeing many different technologies that will analyze raw proof of play logs to measure different dimensions of effectiveness. Here are a few examples:
1- To look at the behavior of a particular system or group of systems due to help troubleshoot a complaint .
2- Verify the veracity of the campaign performance report by comparing it to the raw data
3- An automatic playlog auditing system by tying on-site auditor logs of what was displayed to the playlogs reported by the player.
As a side note, nobody wants to pay for ad plays that have not been displayed on the screen, In order to comply with item (3), proof of play logs must actually be proof of display logs. In other words, each playlog entry must also take into account if the display was showing the ad.
2. Firedrake | September 26th, 2007 at 11:05 am
Very interesting insight, Daniel. I think you just opened Pandora’s box, because there are so many different things meant by different people when they say ‘correlating proof of play with POS.’ As for tracking the direct ROI from campaigns, true, you can just divide the sales uplift amounts by the ad spend and get that ROI number bypassing the proof of play data. But what if there was no or low sales uplift and the advertiser wants to know if their ad was played at all, and if it did, whether it was played according to the campaign plan? Or, if equal ad budgets were spent in two similar stores on the same copy but the sales uplift is very different? Of course other factors should be considered, such as ‘out of stock’ or wrong ad copy version, etc., but I still think the proof of play data is a valuable component of ROI measurement in retail digital signage. It just gives so much more rich info for analysis. My point is that, apart from measuring the effectiveness of each ad copy version, correlating proof of play with the sales uplift also allows you to see ‘what I did right’ (or wrong) in terms of scheduling: was the day part picked right, saturation (plays per loop), etc., so you can tweak those parameters too, if needed.
3. Top Internet Business&hellip | October 17th, 2007 at 1:10 pm
I couldn’t understand some parts of this article, but it sounds interesting…
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