PlaceIQ Proves Place Visit Rate™ Delivers Real World Measured ROI
Reveals 50% Lift of On-Premise Visits For Leading Retailer
CAMPAIGN OBJECTIVE
Use PlaceIQ mobile targeting to reach relevant shoppers and educate them about the retailer’s products and pricing
Use PVR™ to measure the effectiveness of driving consumers to specific retail location
Deploy sophisticated A/B test to understand performance of PVR™ against the controlled market
APPROACH
PlaceIQ targeted both in-home and out-of-home audiences who, through PlaceIQ’s location intelligence platform, were deemed to be likely shoppers. PlaceIQ validated the PVR™ metric using a traditional A/B test and control model that proved substantial lift. For the test, the exposed group was served targeted mobile advertisements, while the control group was a random selection of observed devices.
RESULTS
Analysis of our retailer’s campaign, revealed astounding insights and results when looking at the data:
The A/B test proved PVR™ results in a massive uplift of in-store visitations. Our exposed group was approximately +50% more likely to visit our client’s store than those in the control group
It showed that those people who clicked on our clients ad were about +46% more likely to visit its store than users who were only exposed to the ad. Engagement matters!
LEARNINGS & INSIGHTS Measurement Confirmation: PlaceIQ was able to validate its new mobile KPI, Place Visit Rate™, with real on-premise ROI confirmation.
Key Learnings: PVR™ allows brands to learn more about their consumer behavior than ever before. See the distance between when the device was first served an impression, to when it appeared inside a store. Measure how long after being served an impression, a device was later seen in a store. See how store visits measure against impressions served over time. Competitive PVR™: learn how many of your consumers visited competitor locations.
Vertical Application: With PVR™ showing outstanding success in the Retail category, by virtue of its unique nature, we find this metric to be a perfect match for other vertical channels. These include, but are not limited to: Auto (dealerships), Entertainment, CPG, Travel and QSR.
Case Study: PlaceIQ Drives 118% Lift of In-Store Sales for Major CPG Brand
PlaceIQ, Medialets and FRWD Team Up to Drive 118% Lift of In-Store Sales for Major CPG Brand Through Mobile Ad Campaign
PlaceIQ, the mobile audience company, along with Medialets, the essential platform for mobile advertising, and FRWD, a leader in Shopper & Mobile marketing reveal how their innovative approach to mobile marketing was able to directly spike in-store sales for CPG client, Meguiar’s (an auto care products brand owned by 3M)
Campaign Objective
Build a multi-faceted mobile ad campaign to drive in-store sales
Leverage all the benefits unique to mobile (SMS, rich capabilities like “touch”, barcode scanning and, most importantly, location and audience)
Approach
Meguiar’s agency, FRWD, engaged PlaceIQ and Medialets for the mobile advertising campaign.
PlaceIQ determined optimal markets to support based on Meguiar’s sales data, customer sales data, target population and market share. Using Place Context, they identified the best places and times to reach relevant auto audiences.
These highly targeted consumers were then served a truly rich mobile advertising experience, created, served and measured by Medialets. The rich media iPhone ad unit initiated a banner that prompted users to “tap” to learn more about a special offer and find a store. When tapped, the banner expanded to reveal a dirty car that a user could ‘clean’ by wiping the screen with their finger. The ad unit emulated the experience of using Meguiar’s Car Wax in a fun and interactive way and helped drive users to retail.
Results
Analysis of Meguiar’s in-store retail sales for both control markets and exposed markets revealed the following compelling results achieved:
Market Level Sales lift:
118% Sales lift for exposed markets over controlled markets in retail sales
Engagement Metrics:
Rich Media Unit engagement
109% lift in response rates (CTR) with location enhanced data compared with non-location enhanced units
Engagement rate = 2X Medialets’ benchmarks
150% lift in response rates compared to standard banner averages
Mobile Site Engagement
21% watched “How-To” videos on the go
20% used the Store Locator
83% browsed products
Insights and Intelligence:
The Meguiar’s campaign was successful in proving that mobile advertising can effectively drive in-store sales.
Added Value: PlaceIQ was able to unlock and report upon a wealth of learning’s and insights around audience engagement. Among the highlights were that College Students and Young Adults were the most engaged audience segments in the Houston market; whereas in Orlando, families and Senior’s made up the most engaged audience. These new and powerful learning’s allow for direct messaging and strategy to specific audiences in specifics markets in the future
Multi-Faceted Marketing: This campaign exemplifies the true opportunity of intelligent, targeted, mobile marketing. Not only by efficiently targeting a specific audience with the right rich and engaging message, at the right time and place, but also by capturing the real success of this approach – moving consumers all the way through the path to purchase, while being able to measure and provide insights on that closed loop
Bright Outlook: We believe this represents mobile-specific innovation in measurement, targeting, Shopper Marketing and collaborative integration. Moreover, with this just Meguiar’s second year experimenting with mobile marketing, this success bodes extremely well for the adoption of mobile in general.
Founded in 2010, PlaceIQ provides location intelligence for mobile advertising and other markets. The company’s flagship product, PlaceContext, extracts contextual intelligence generated from large amounts of location based data such as place data, event data, digital, mobile and social data – as well as a diversity of other location specific information. PlaceIQ performs a series of data cleansing, normalization, analysis, and machine learning processes to extract an understanding of the type of audience present in a specific location at a specific time – enabling the ability to audience target in mobile highly effectively.
The Business Challenges
The service’s back-end data tier has to be able to process vast amounts of data and handle real-time and mobile demands. It is critical that PlaceIQ has a highly scalable and efficient caching layer. Prior to using a caching solution, the data tier sent every request to fulfillment servers. The company considered deploying its own memcached infrastructure to create a caching solution.
Why Amazon Web Services
PlaceIQ decided to use Amazon ElastiCache because “Amazon ElastiCache provided a turn-key approach to installing, managing, and scaling a large memcached cluster,” says Steve Milton, CTO and co-founder of PlaceIQ. Amazon ElastiCache allowed PlaceIQ to quickly implement and deploy a caching layer infrastructure within their existing application stack.
PlaceIQ’s existing data tier includes a RESTful interface for data retrieval. To employ Amazon ElastiCache and the memcached based protocol with the RESTful based web service, PlaceIQ uses a caching proxy layer with a Nginx web server and a corresponding Nginx memcached plugin. The diagram below demonstrates the site architecture.
Figure 1: PlaceIQ Site Architecture
The caching proxy layer hashes the requested uniform resource identifier (URI) and then queries the corresponding node within the Amazon ElastiCache group. The solution uses Elastic Load Balancing to distribute traffic across the Nginx caching proxy web servers running in Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances.
This URI hashing strategy eliminates redundant copies of cached data in the Amazon ElastiCache cluster. If the requested URI is not found within Amazon ElastiCache, the request is forwarded to a set of origin servers for fulfillment. The resulting response from the origin server is placed in Amazon ElastiCache for future use. The PlaceIQ team uses Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) and Amazon CloudWatch to monitor the different components of PlaceIQ’s distributed architecture.
The Business Benefits
“After deploying Amazon ElastiCache, PlaceIQ’s average end-to end response time for its web services improved by 83%,” says Milton. “Furthermore, we are saving $1,000 per month in direct costs. Amazon ElastiCache allows us to improve our service response times rapidly and economically for our customers. This in turn allows us to serve customer demand with fewer backend servers reducing our cost.”
To learn more about how AWS can help support your in-memory caching needs, visit our AWS ElastiCache product detail page: http://aws.amazon.com/elasticache/.
