At our recent Attribution Summit, we gathered with agencies, brands, and publishing platforms to dive into our most recent innovations in Foursquare Attribution and how we are building for the future of holistic measurement.
During the event, Gary Little, Foursquare CEO, emphasized the complexity of what we build at Foursquare, stating “Geospatial data is complex, very messy, and it’s the real world so it’s constantly changing.” This sentiment rings true for both location intelligence and the advertising industry as a whole. The reality of a constantly changing world presents a challenge for advertisers, making it difficult to find a measurement partner they can count on to provide accurate campaign reports as consumer behavior shifts.
To solve for this, Foursquare has reimagined Attribution by enhancing our Attribution pipeline and launching Sales Impact, which allows marketers to measure the impact of advertising on in-store visits and sales.
Here are the four key takeaways you should know from this masterclass:
1. We’ve introduced a new way to measure using machine learning to process complex geospatial data
Over the past few months, we have fully re-architected our Attribution foundation. The quality of the systems that produce campaign impact is the most important factor for determining accurate results, so that’s why enhancing our Attribution pipeline represents a substantial improvement in accuracy that marketers can start experiencing today.
How did we do it? We took a ground-up approach to improve how we leverage machine learning algorithms to simplify the complexity of geospatial data, introducing new checkpoints to ensure reliable accuracy at every step of determining results.
Here’s how we measure in five simple (but crucial) steps:
- Input generation – Generating impressions, visits, & transactions
- Normalization – Reflecting reality with normalization
- Matching – Matching across our panel
- Scoring – Crediting impressions
- Projection – Extrapolating out to the campaign
Check out our recent technical post here to learn more about each step and our improvements.
2. Accurate measurement requires high-quality first-party data backed by machine learning and human verification
Without a strong foundation that ensures accuracy, advertisers are left to make crucial budgeting decisions using unreliable results that will likely lead to campaign failure against KPIs or budget wastage. Our approach, backed by datasets that use both machine learning and human verification, guarantees accuracy and stability, producing results marketers can act on with confidence. This wouldn’t be possible without our high-quality first-party data at our core.
3. A strong foundation unlocks additional campaign outcomes and actionable metrics
One driver of these pipeline enhancements was our most recent launch of Sales Impact, which enables marketers to measure the impact of media campaigns on in-store outcomes. In perfecting these capabilities, we had to reimagine how we measure for better correlation of results between unique conversion outcomes, such as visits and transactions.
In doing so, marketers unlock over seventeen new metrics in their Attribution reports, such as incremental transactions, sales lift, and basket size – all continuously refreshed throughout the campaign and analyzable in granular data cuts.
4. We’re building new capabilities to drive pre- and post-campaign insights
Today, Attribution is the market leader in helping advertisers drive and prove campaign success during their flight. However, we know that location intelligence is valuable at every stage of the campaign lifecycle.
That’s why we’re building new solutions for the crucial phases of pre- and post-campaign to help advertisers select optimal strategies during campaign planning and simplify setup, as well as benchmark past performance to better plan for future campaigns. For our partners, we are also adding new capabilities for publishers to understand their advertisers’ performance with rich context.
Stay tuned as the best is yet to come
With our Attribution Summit behind us, we are left feeling energized by the feedback and enthusiasm from our clients. With exciting innovations in store, you’ll want to stay tuned for more updates on our products and upcoming events as we shape the future of measurement.
