Foursquare today has rolled out the latest feature to its attribution engine, Foursquare Attribution. Known as Sales Impact, the feature federates an extensive and holistic set of steps that consumers take before they buy something. And like all things Foursquare, Sales Impact specializes in offline consumer activity.
With a tighter feedback loop, Foursquare’s constituents – everyone from retailers to brand marketers – can more precisely determine the things that drive all that consumer action. Once those things are identified (think: parts of a multi-channel marketing campaign), users can strategically double down.
This is an ongoing challenge for brands and retailers, due to the factor noted above: offline shopping. Though it accounts for a vast majority of consumer spending, it’s much harder to track than online clickstreams (atoms versus bits). This is Foursquare’s longstanding value proposition. So what’s new?
“We have rebuilt our entire Foursquare Attribution stack from the ground up,” Foursquare CTO Vikram Gundeti told Localogy Insider, “based on years of learnings from operating in this space. We have introduced a new pipeline for processing impressions and overhauled our entire methodology to not only surface metrics related to foot traffic but augment them with transactions and sales information so that our customers get a holistic view of the customer journey. This new software also sets us up to provide more granular insights that help marketers with future campaign planning.”
Unified Front End
If anyone can pull this off, it’s Foursquare, given the multifaceted platform it has developed over the past fifteen years. This is what Gundeti means by rebuilding Foursquare’s stack. Sales Impact will be a more unified front end for all those pieces. For color, Foursquare provided us with the following feature list.
Full customer journey understanding
Users can interpret performance from impression to visit to purchase using a common methodology for comparative analysis across the entire purchase journey, which unlocks confident business decisions and results.
Granularity & insights
With omnichannel learnings from over seventeen new metrics, like average basket size and sales lift, marketers can maximize ROI – all with the customization and clarity expected in Foursquare Attribution today. With more metrics marketers have a greater ability to assess performance and areas of opportunity, leading to a better path to results.
Actionable real-time reporting: Users get reporting updates throughout campaigns to make optimizations in flight. Reporting updates mid-flight makes insights actionable at the time when marketers need them, without having to wait for the next campaign to refine the strategy.
Easy onboarding: Marketers can start using Sales Impact or add it to campaigns they’re already measuring with Foursquare, using common processes, feasibility checks, and a familiar reporting experience.
Physical Footprint
Of course, no product these days would be complete without AI infusions – especially an offline attribution technology. In fact, Foursquare has employed ample AI for years. But with recent inflections in the underlying technology, it was able to apply a fresh coat of AI to the new Sales Attribution feature.
“One of the key aspects of the new pipeline is that it is built with modularity in mind,” said Gundeti. “The uber pipeline employs around 15 different ML and heuristic algorithms, each of which can be evolved and tested independently of each other. This modularity has allowed us to test with newer transformer based embedding models in certain aspects of the stack, for instance, our algorithm to match transaction strings to Places.”
His reference to “Places” is Foursquare’s API that taps into its extensive bank of point-of-interest (POI) data. That once again traces back to Foursquare’s offline specialties, noted above, and makes today’s rollout broadly applicable to a large addressable market of anyone with a physical footprint.
“Our new offering is focused on creating a more in-depth understanding of user behaviors in the real world,” said Gundeti, “driven by digital marketing and advertising. It benefits all our customers across various verticals equally from that perspective.”
