For some retailers, in-store foot traffic is critically important to enable brand experience and feet on the ground are simply more valuable than lines in a database. But there’s only ever so much available budget. For a long time, it felt that these retailers had to choose: online or offline?
Along comes Facebook. Social media may only have been widespread for the last few years personal touch has allowed retailers to invest heavily in activity that is simultaneously branding and DR.
We chose IKEA Cardiff. Sale activity had been planned to coincide with the New Year and so we knew we’d have something to talk about to the local populace. Working with a relatively limited budget, our priority was to get the highest possible reach within favourable geographic parameters.
A geofenced area was established around the IKEA Cardiff store, connecting together multiple network masts and using triangulation to trace a precise outline within which we would measure people. Being able to track users from social to sale using mobile geofencing was in itself a huge step forward, a landmark moment for social media and retail alike.
Two separate groups were created: exposed and control. These were based on the phone number of the handset: numbers ending in odds saw the adverts; evens did not. The brilliance of this variable is that it is completely random: there is no pattern to number assignation whatsoever. This measurement was correspondingly
