Creating an Eddystone Campaign to Measure the Offline Attribution of a Google AdWords Campaign

It is one thing to think your campaign worked, and another to know it. Ask any marketer out there and he/she would agree that data-driven marketing has been a major boon in this front as it helps measure and track the scope of opportunities via digital efforts. So much so that, it often outpaces traditional marketing channels such as TV and print, with ease. However, one area that has proved to be elusive and has claimed itself as the holy grail of retail marketing campaigns is offline attribution.

According to a recent study by Chief Marketing Officer Council, 49% of the surveyed marketers said that bridging digital and physical customer experiences is “selective at best”. One of the most challenging aspects in this regard being – able to tie online marketing efforts directly to offline actions such as in-store visits and sales. With a total of $220B being projected to be spent on advertising by 2018, offline attribution has become one of those crucial metrics that marketers are looking to bank on to measure the true impact of their advertising dollars.

In other words, online-to-offline attribution is the ability to understand whether or not your online media campaign is driving foot traffic and sales at your physical store.  In this post, we will talk about how you can easily create a campaign using Beaconstac to accurately attribute incremental foot traffic at your coffee shop to your Google Adwords campaign.

Campaign Objective

Let’s say you recently launched a new coffee concoction, the Burnt Caramel Macchiato, at your coffee shop on account of summer. The objective of this campaign is to help you accurately attribute how many people who visited your coffee shop soon after the launch, came in-store after having seen an online ad on the new coffee concoction.

Step 1: Add Beacons to the dashboard and install them at your coffee shop

Before we begin, the first thing to do is to purchase beacons. You can take a look at our Beaconstac platform, that includes everything you need to get started. Using Beaconstac you can set up your own Eddystone campaign, without a developer’s help – in less than 15 minutes!

Once you have purchased a beacon, its details such as the UID-Namespace, UID-Instance and URL, will be fully set up before we ship the beacons to you.

You can name the beacons for easy identification. For the purpose of this campaign, we have named the beacon as ‘Beacon_Billing Counter’ and placed it near the billing counter. This way, any visitor who walks into your coffee shop will receive a contextually relevant beacon notification about the new coffee concoction while they wait in line to place an order.

Once the beacon details are added, they are ready to be installed.

Step 2: Set up the notification or card that is to be displayed

After installing the beacon, all you have to do is create a card that visitors will see on their device. Cards are basically creatives that show up as a notification on visitors’ mobile device once they are in the range of a beacon. Using Beaconstac, you can create cards dynamically, using simple markdown language. It thus saves you the trouble of having to first create a webpage or a card, host it and then post the URL. Here’s all you need to do:

(i) Go to ‘Cards’ and click on ‘Add Card’.

(ii) Type in a title to identify your card with ease. For the purpose of this campaign, I have titled the card ‘New Coffee Drink’.

(iii) Type in the text (in simple markdown language format) and add an image that you want to display to your visitors. You can even preview it on the platform. Once you have finalized the look and text displayed on the card, save it for later use.

(iv) Next, click on the ‘Beacon_Billing Counter’ beacon and choose ‘Card’ as the type of campaign that you plan to run. You can then go ahead and choose ‘New Coffee Drink’ from the drop-down menu.

This card will be sent to all customers who are within the range of the Eddystone beacon, that has been deployed at the billing counter.

Step 3: Integrate this card with your digital advertising platform

Once you have set up the card, scroll further down the page or navigate to the section that lists out ‘Facebook Pixel ID’ and ‘Google Conversion ID’. Now, you may already know that there are multiple platforms out there that empower businesses to leverage the actions people take on their website across devices to run more effective advertising campaigns. Two such popular platforms being Facebook Business and Google AdWords.

For the purpose of this campaign, we will be leveraging Google AdWords to reach out to new customers as they either search on Google for words related to your business or browse websites with related themes. Once you have created an account for yourself on Google Adwords, you will be allotted a Google Conversion ID. This tool allows you to run highly effective Google AdWords campaigns targeting specific audience segments.

Once you have typed in this ID, you can go ahead and save the card.

And we’re all set! Any user who goes online and searches for something related to coffee on Google or browses through a food website or blog, he/she will see the following ad on the new coffee concoction that you launched recently.

Now, when the same user walks into your coffee shop, he/she will receive the following beacon notification on his/her device while he/she waits in line at the billing counter to place an order.

On engaging with this beacon notification, your business will now be provided deep insights on consumer behaviour in the real world with the same granularity and precision that was previously possible using online data.

You can simply log into your Google AdWords account and track the interaction points of each and every user who clicked on your Google ad. This way integrating Beaconstac with your Google Adwords account will empower you to accurately attribute how many people who visited your coffee shop soon after the launch, came in-store after having seen your an online ad.

In fact, it is this granularity and deterministic nature of the proximity data that makes it easy for businesses to gain an in-depth understanding of the what users have been doing inside stores, in specific departments and the kind of products they have interacted with.

Do try this out and let me know your thoughts about this campaign. If there a specific campaign you would like to read about, I’ll be more than happy to share how you can get it done using Beaconstac. 

If you are looking to get started on a short pilot, head to our Beaconstac store page and invest in a set of beacons and our Premium subscription plan. You can have the campaigns up and running in less than 15 mins!

• Author Details

Author Details

Devika Girish

Check out other posts by Devika on Beaconstac! You can also explore the related posts below to help you maximize your ROI.

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