Andy McNab, UK managing director at S4M, explains why the CPIV ad model is ideal for all digital campaigns.

Not so long ago the digital advertising industry was all about chasing after the latest trend, be it mobile, VR, or online streaming. Clearly, the industry is moving beyond immature fads and maturing to focus on quality instead quantity. Too often ad metrics are siloed between online and offline indicators. The ultimate ad model today should consolidate online campaign performance with offline attribution. This is why the Cost Per Incremental Visit buying model is emerging as the ultimate ad model for any digital campaign.

As it happens, the CPIV is not trying to reinvent the wheel but just being smarter about the existing industry standard of the Cost per Visit (CPV) ad model. Leveraging location technologies to measure when consumers are walking into a store is nothing new. Partnering with third-party data players to verify store visit data is also an important prerequisite that is quickly gaining industry consensus. So, what’s really new?

Loyalty versus additional shoppers
Shopper fidelity programmes have been around for ages. Any smart retailer knows the importance of making loyal customers feel special and the need to sweet talk uninitiated prospects. The CPIV model separates the organic shoppers from newly gained consumers. Previously, the CPV model measured total visits into a store and did not take into account organic shoppers that would have gone into stores without the online ad exposure. With CPV, advertisers are actually seeing an inflated visitation rate from their campaigns. With S4M’s CPIV buying model, advertisers are only being charged for visits that are incremental as a direct yield from their online campaigns.

No more one-size-fits-all
The true cost of driving a visitor to a fast food restaurant is not the same as bringing a prospecting car buyer into a dealership. There should not be a flat fee for the cost per incremental visit regardless of industry verticals. Location data provides powerful insights to understand and predict consumer behaviour, this can also help determine the true cost of newly acquired visitors into stores. Our CPIV buying model is tailored to each advertiser’s brand notoriety, campaign period. Then, our predictive machine learning algorithms model the true CPIV price by taking into consideration historical visitation data.

Game-changing secret weapon
When all is said and done, it is normal that marketers should only be paying for campaigns that truly deliver footfall uplift to stores at a true price based on their specific industries. So the real game-changer is really being able to measure store visits generated from digital campaigns in real-time and optimizing online parameters like geolocation targeting, publisher list and ad formats while the campaign is ongoing. Consolidating live offline insights with online KPIs is what will ultimately guarantee advertisers ad spend efficiency. It’s time for marketers to embrace incremental visits as the new transactional KPI in their digital campaigns.