Fix the Blind Spot in Your Social Media Metrics

Understand consumer behaviors in the real world

Are your social media ad campaigns generating IRL results?

If you’re like most brands, you don’t actually know. It’s not clear how your efforts on social media are changing customers’ offline behavior. You’re not sure how that compares to your performance on other channels. And you don’t have the depth of knowledge you need to optimize across those channels to achieve the best overall results.

It’s not your fault.

Only recently has the industry developed technology that is smart enough to reliably link social ad experiences to offline activity. But making those kinds of connections is increasingly important. Social media budgets are growing like mad, and social carries greater weight in media portfolios. The more brands spend in these new channels, the more essential it is to be able to measure not just their social success but their entire campaigns holistically.

Getting a complete picture

The truth is, most online and offline marketing is still done in silos. Social campaigns, for example, are measured against social metrics. But social’s impact is much greater—affecting everything from TV viewing, offline conversations, and where dollars are getting spent. Marketers need to be able to measure performance and compare results against other media investments. That’s the essence of effective ad planning.

Location data is the key to unlocking this knowledge.

After all, customers don’t just live online. Sure, they scroll through their social media pages, play online games and download digital movies. It goes without saying that they do an increasing amount of their shopping online. Connecting those digital dots has been the focus of most online and mobile campaigns.

But the customer journey today takes place online, offline and everywhere in between. Shoppers still browse malls, drive to drugstores, stroll to coffee shops and catch movies on the big screen. And that real-world action is being influenced by social media campaigns. But without location data, it’s practically impossible to know just how much—and how that compares to and works with your other spending areas.

Bridging the gap

Location data bridges the gap between consumers’ online behavior and their offline activity. With it, brands can begin to understand how different channels are affecting each other, and how and when they’re driving sales. Leveraging location data and AI, marketers can not only determine whether a particular social media ad attracted customers to stores—but also when they visited and how long they spent there.

That intelligence is powerful. Visitation data gives marketers a single metric with which to measure performance across media channels. They measure a solo campaign or multiple approaches across different media, and compare campaign uplift to industry benchmarks.

Of course, none of this matters if the data isn’t reliable and responsibly sourced. At Cuebiq, what makes our data collection methodology so valuable, is the fact that it follows a strict privacy compliant framework – ensuring user privacy and transparency at every step and GDPR compliance when the regulation will take effect in the EU. Our SDK collects anonymous location data from opted-in users by leveraging GPS, WiFi and Bluetooth signals to understand anonymous offline behaviors at scale. 

As a result we’re able to help marketers map and measure the offline consumer journey.

The goal for marketers: use location intelligence as one component of a successful measurement strategy. It builds on and complements other metrics, creating a vivid and—finally—complete picture of ad performance.

And, location data benefits both social networks and advertisers. Networks can demonstrate the value of their platforms in facilitating real-world purchases, and encourage advertisers to up their budgets to increase returns. Advertisers can dial in their media investments across channels to earn and keep more customers, and optimize their ROI.

Consumers win, too, gaining an improved ad experience—across all touchpoints on their journey.

Antonio Tomarchio (@tonytom82) is the founder and CEO of Cuebiq.