Location attribution goes mainstream, as Pandora marks 400th campaign with the KPI

Pandora has been working with location analytics provider Placed (owned by Snap) over the last four years. The two have been measuring the offline impact and incremental visitation lift from Pandora campaigns in the fast-food, retail and tourism verticals. Pandora uses offline measurement to track the efficacy of campaigns in a multi-platform environment: mobile, desktop, smart speaker and in-car audio.

In an announcement Wednesday, the companies said they had measured more than 400 campaigns for more than 100 brands, driving more than 60 million incremental offline visits over the past four years. And while Pandora uses other KPIs, depending on the campaign, the company has increasingly turned to offline metrics to prove value to advertisers.

Pandora’s Keri Degroote, head of Sales Research & Analytics, said that the company has seen tremendous success using location analytics. She explained that Pandora is beating Placed’s industry benchmarks, often by 20 percent or more.

Degroote also indicated that she’s seen rising demand among brands and advertisers for location analytics and offline measurement during the four years the company has been working with Placed. She told me that “every single big advertiser” in relevant categories is now looking for offline attribution.

As recently as last year there was still a lot of education to be done about offline measurement and its benefits. However this is something that brands are now requesting at the outset, relieving Degroote and her team of the challenge of educating them.

Degroote explained that the campaigns using this research “are up double digits.” In other words, these advertisers are investing more in Pandora campaigns after seeing real-world traffic and visitation results.

An example campaign discussed was one for retailer Lane Bryant. The campaign was run over the holiday shopping season last year and sought to reach the company’s core demographic (women size 14 to 28). It used a mixture of audio and display ad creative on Pandora, targeted to a custom audience segment.

Pandora was able to show the retailer it drove a 17 percent lift in store visits, which was higher than the overall Placed retail benchmark of 7 percent. Degroote added that location analytics are also helping the company optimize ad creative for customers.

Another virtue of location analytics in the fast-food category, one of Pandora’s three offline-measurement verticals, is that it can show ad effectiveness in an industry where cash is still heavily used and credit card data doesn’t tell the whole consumer story.

In addition to Placed, there are a large number of other location data providers and vendors in the market. All of them are not identical and location analytics are not without challenges, especially regarding accuracy and data transparency. The quality of location data for targeting and analytics can vary widely, which is something advertisers need to better understand and where more education is needed.

[This article originally appeared on MarTech Today.]

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