Despite the success of e-commerce before and during the pandemic, consumers are eager and have an affinity to shop the best deals in-store, especially during the highly anticipated shopping tradition of Black Friday. In fact, back in 2021, consumers were 2x more comfortable shopping in-store compared to the year prior. According to third-party research, 66.5M consumers shopped in-store during Black Friday in 2021, with an even higher share of total weekend traffic (47%) on Friday. With the help of Foursquare Attribution, let’s take a look at how and where holiday consumers are shopping today, and how this data can help retailers maximize media investments.
Today’s holiday shoppers are seeking more value in stores. Foursquare data reveals that in-store visitation to discount stores, wholesale clubs and big box retailers have increased year-over-year, indicating that retailers attracted more bargain hunters. With value at the top of consumers’ minds, retailers can leverage Foursquare Attribution to create custom cuts by demographic to measure and understand which behavioral and conquesting audiences/segments drive this lift of visitation.
Driving lift among key behavioral audiences is important. Our data shows that new customers and low frequency customers drove 22% and 20% lift respectively. Retailers can leverage the holiday shopping season to prospect and convert new customers into loyalists as they search for the best shopping deals. One useful approach would be to measure performance across customer loyalty in order to understand what drives them to shop in-store. In terms of the actual audience, millennials (ages 25-34) drove the highest behavioral lift at 7%, which is 0.8% points higher than Foursquare’s discount and big box benchmark of 6.2%. Knowing this information, retailers can use Foursquare Attribution to measure the performance of demographic audiences and optimize in real-time towards high performing tactics.
In order to actually drive visit lift, businesses need to focus on opportunity channels. For instance, audio is an exciting channel opportunity for holiday discount and big box retailers to tap into. Our Attribution data indicates that holiday discount store and big box audio campaigns drove lift 55% of the time, which is 16% points above the FSQ benchmark of 39%. In fact, advertisers are planning to increase podcast ad budgets in 2022 as ⅔ of gift-givers admit they could be influenced by streaming audio or podcast ads in their holiday spending. Spotify noticed a similar upward trend, with foot traffic among listeners increasing by 37% in December 2021 compared to October, based on recent research with Foursquare.
This is all the more reason to leverage tools like Attribution: retailers can utilize this tool to help understand the role each media channel plays in converting customers. Ultimately, it presents a measurement opportunity for retailers to optimize towards top performing channels, targeting tactics and measure cross-channel performance by platform.
With the holiday shopping season approaching, it’s never too late for retailers to reach discount store and big box consumers at the right moments, in real-time, based on their historical behavior. Foursquare Attribution additionally helps retailers understand the impact of behavioral audiences and proximity with custom cuts, enabling them to influence consumers before they visit a big box or discount store as well as during on-the-go moments. Think visits to the grocery store, clothing shopping sprees or commutes to work. Not to mention it also includes an in-the-moment feature, in which retailers can message their audience when consumers are at or near a discount or big box location.
We created Attribution so that brands could measure the effectiveness of their campaigns and ultimately deliver on key business objectives. With Foursquare’s comprehensive reporting dashboard and real-time optimization capabilities, brands can more acutely understand how each campaign impacted their customers’ path to conversion and lean into high performing tactics by demographics, visitation frequencies and media mix.
Learn more about Foursquare Attribution and reach out to get started with a demo today.
