Foursquare and Nielsen Collaborate to Map Digital Ads to In-Store Visitation and Sales

Understanding a consumer’s path to purchase is tricky but crucial for marketers and advertisers, especially for brands with substantial brick and mortar sales. For e-commerce, the process is somewhat simpler: digital ads link to online purchases, leveraging the “cookie” for accountability.

Yet only 8% of US consumer spending takes place online. The rest happens in the real world in storefronts, auto dealerships, restaurants, malls, grocery stores and more. And there is no “cookie” for the physical world… until now. In a mobile-first world, new ways to understand real world movement and spending are opening up, thanks to advances in technology.

As a location intelligence company, Foursquare has spent more than seven years building a sharp map of the world and has a unique understanding of how consumers move through it. Location is at the center of everything we do, from our consumer apps (Foursquare City Guide and Foursquare Swarm) to our business solutions that leverage consumer insights (always de-identified and in the aggregate) for advertising and enterprise products.

Today, we’re proud to announce a new strategic collaboration that will connect the power of Foursquare’s foot traffic data to Nielsen, a global performance management company that provides a comprehensive understanding of what consumers watch and buy.

Attribution by Foursquare allows for real-time insights into the behavior of (de-identified) consumers: an in-depth understanding of how much digital ads actually drive customers into stores. We leverage Foursquare’s ability to observe how consumer phones move in and out of over 100 million locations globally, both through check-ins and background location awareness. Attribution is a product we launched earlier in 2016, and scores of marketers are using it every day.

Today we announce a way to connect ads to foot traffic lift and spending lift in offline locations, through the combined power of Attribution by Foursquare and Nielsen sales measurement. This combination of Nielsen’s sales measurement and Foursquare’s award-winning tool will be available to Nielsen clients who leverage Nielsen’s suite of world-class digital media measurement products.

Nielsen’s digital products, such as Nielsen Buyer Insights, are designed to allow marketers to measure consumer conversion from digital ad exposure to purchase activity, and adjust marketing and targeting tactics accordingly. Now, marketers will be able to measure customer conversion at every step of the way — from ad impression to store visit to product purchase through Nielsen sales lift measurement with Foursquare’s foot traffic data — and make more informed decisions on ad spend using this analysis.

At an aggregate level, marketers will be able to understand whether consumers are inspired by an ad to visit a store (against a control group) or whether an ad campaign with certain messaging drove very high-spend, high-converting customers into retail locations. Marketers will be able to better understand their target audience by seeing where they are failing to entice consumers and where they are hitting the mark.

Andrew Feigenson, Managing Director, Digital at Nielsen, added this perspective: “We’re excited to be working with Foursquare to connect our datasets in a way that illuminates new insights for marketers. Now our digital marketing tools will offer a more complete view of the consumer journey and allow marketers to make better decisions.”

Foursquare has spent years building a map that sees the world the way that phones see it. Our technology has a unique way of understanding location that gives consumers great recommendations and tips, while gamifying life with Foursquare Swarm check-ins. Foursquare’s location intelligence is leveraged by brands and businesses worldwide: in addition to powering location features for companies like Uber, Samsung and Twitter, Foursquare foot traffic data helps marketers and advertisers at Fortune 500 companies make better business decisions.

By collaborating with Nielsen, we’re opening up fresh insights and understanding for business decision makers, extending the reach of Attribution by Foursquare to new brands and marketers, and further connecting the dots from ad exposure to store visit to purchase.

Want to learn more about how Attribution by Foursquare can help your brand’s marketing efforts? Visit our website or contact ads@foursquare.com.