Online to Offline Attribution: Connecting Digital Ads to In-Store Sales

Client

Our client is a prominent wholesale department store chain who sought to expand their Retail Media Network (RMN) to enhance the shopping experience through relevant ads. By leveraging RMNs, retailers allow advertisers to reach consumers directly within the shopping ecosystem, driving sales and improving ad relevance.

Challenge

While the client had successfully implemented advertising campaigns through a third-party platform for their RMN, they struggled to measure the true performance of these campaigns:

• The existing platform could only attribute online interactions to online sales, missing a key piece of the puzzle—offline sales.
• There was no visibility into how in-store sales were influenced by online ad interactions, which made accurate cross-channel attribution
• Without a way to measure how ads impacted offline sales, it was difficult to demonstrate ROI and optimize future campaigns.

Solution

Hexaware designed an innovative attribution solution to bridge the gap between online ad interactions and offline sales, without disrupting the client’s existing Adobe Experience Platform (AEP) and AWS technologies. The data-driven marketing solution included:

• Enhanced tagging: Updated the tagging of onsite ads to collect online IDs for every ad served and clicked, sending them to Adobe AEP.
• Cross-channel mapping: Mapped the online IDs collected from ads to in-store purchases within Adobe’s platform, connecting ad interactions with offline sales.
• Data enrichment: Built an AWS pipeline to enrich attribution data before sending it to the third-party attribution and reporting platform.
• Daily automation: Automated the extraction and delivery of data from AEP to the attribution platform on a daily basis.

Benefits

The new solution provided several key benefits:

• Cross-channel attribution: Enabled the client to connect online ads with offline sales, unlocking a complete data story for their Retail Media Network.
• Improved reporting: Provided the client with multi-touch attribution reports across channels, offering better insights into campaign performance.
• Increased conversions: Projected a 10% increase in conversions due to better optimization of ad campaigns, resulting in a stronger Return on Ad Spend (ROAS).
• Strengthened partnerships: Demonstrated campaign success to retail media partners, enhancing business relationships.

Summary

Hexaware empowered the client with an attribution solution that seamlessly integrated with their existing Adobe and AWS technologies. By enriching and mapping online ad data to in-store sales, the client could now accurately measure and optimize the performance of their Retail Media Network. This solution drove better decision-making, improved conversion rates, and strengthened key business relationships with retail media partners.