What Is Visit Lift & Why It Matters

An economic downturn means that marketers have no choice but to measure more, measure fast, measure better and most importantly, act on measurement metrics. Visit Lift – or footfall measurement – is going to be a crucial metric on this journey. Read on to understand what Visit Lift is and why it matters to the modern marketer now more than ever.

Your consumers around the world are making up for the past few years of stillness and boredom. Restaurants are buzzing again. Malls are packed – holiday season in-store shopping surged in 2022, with experts pegging in-store sales at $1.058 trillion, the lion’s share of over 80% of 2022 holiday sales. Travel services company AAA found that 2022 was the third-busiest year for air travel in the US since it started tracking the number. Tens of millions in Asia traveled by air, road, and rail in the recent holiday season.

The world is well and truly open for business again.

In sharp contrast, businesses and consumers are already feeling the impact of economic headwinds. Big tech layoffs are hitting the headlines around the world. Marketers muted their ad spend projections for 2023 as early as summer 2022. WARC wrote off a staggering $90 billion from its 2023 ad spend forecast.

For brands reeling under the aftermath of the pandemic, especially those whose revenue models rely on physical locations, 2023 is a unique year. There’s a significant opportunity to bounce back, but there are even more constraints in the form of marketing budget cuts. It’s time now, more than ever, to evaluate if your ad spends across social and programmatic, CTV, and expensive OOH campaigns are bringing footfalls to your physical locations.

Sure, you spent a lot of money on a digital campaign for your luxury hotel during the holiday season. Visitors came in hordes. But did they come because of your campaign, or would they have, anyway? That’s the answer you need to safeguard your campaign budget in 2023 and beyond.

And that’s where Visit Lift measurement becomes crucial. Let’s dive right into it.

What is Visit Lift and how Lifesight measures it for brands

Over at Lifesight, we define Visit Lift as the increase in footfall measurement at a brick-and-mortar location – your retail store, hotel, or restaurant – as a result of digital and OOH campaigns. We measure it by surveying your customers’ journey from the time they were exposed to an ad to the time they entered your physical location.

It is the percentage of lift (or decrease, if your campaign really isn’t working) that we arrive at by comparing the normalized visit rate of an exposed group of customers with the normalized visit rate of a control group. The control group comes from Lifesight’s lookalike algorithm.

Visit Lift is one of the most vital metrics on Lifesight Measurements’ dashboard/ report, giving marketers real-time, quick and easy access to it. They have a continuous view of how digital and OOH ads correlate with real-world business outcomes like store visits. Dashboard access eliminates the need for disparate reporting and the time-cost of campaign effectiveness measurement. It allows advertisers to pivot as necessary during the campaign flight to ensure that every ad dollar drives meaningful business outcomes.

Brand Lift Vs. Visit Lift: What’s the difference, and why do marketers need to measure both?

Traditionally, marketing has been about brand awareness, perception and consideration. With TV ads that told engaging stories to print copy that made you stop and read, it was all about making consumers not just remember but actually like your brand.

The outcomes were collectively known as Brand Lift, or what Google defines as a way to measure the impact of ads on the perception of your brand. It’s an excellent metric to understand if your ads and spends are aligned with your overall marketing goal.

However, marketing in 2023, or during any time of flux and change, simply can’t be about perception alone. Your consumer has to be persuaded enough to visit your store – online or offline.

Visit Lift raises the bar for marketing, converting it from a cost center to a revenue center. It goes beyond traditional digital metrics like clicks and impressions and over and beyond conventional marketing metrics like Brand Lift. Instead, Visit Lift measures the impact of your campaign on actual store visits.

Your ROI on Visit Lift measurement

• Achieve enterprise-wide, always-on visibility into how and whether advertising is navigating customers into stores
• Increase advertising ROI, allocate spends with confidence over higher chances of success
• Track campaign progress closely and optimize campaigns in-flight instead of long-drawn post-mortem PowerPoint decks that are typically quickly forgotten
• Evaluate business outcomes across OOH and digital through foolproof attribution, redistribute spends if you need to

Visit Lift is designed to help you guardrail your marketing spends at a time when all indicators point in a single direction: budget cuts.

How to best use Visit Lift for substantial marketing and business outcomes

Visit Lift is a vital metric, especially for brands whose physical locations contribute significantly to revenue models.

But a mistake that many marketers make is thinking of Visit Lift as a set-it-and-forget-it metric. But Lifesight customers who have maximized gains from Visit Lift measurement have a more holistic and always-on approach to it. Here’s what they do differently:

• Measure Visit Lift holistically: The savvy marketer accounts for digital and offline channels like OOH to measure Visit Lift for universal attribution.
• Measure Visit Lift in real-time: The result-obsessed marketer evaluates Visit Lift consistently throughout the campaign in real-time instead of waiting for weeks after the campaign is over.
• Take action on Visit Lift measurement: The intelligent marketer acts on Visit Lift insight in real-time, readjusting ad spend on channels, creative, and messaging that drive the most store footfalls.

Call the shots of your campaign with Visit Lift measurement

Make your ad spend allocation smarter.

Reduce ad waste.

Navigate your campaigns toward real-world success.

Maximize your recession-crunched marketing budget.

Demonstrate outcomes in footfall measurement metrics that mean business.

All with Visit Lift.

But even as one of the most crucial metrics for campaign effectiveness, Visit Lift is not a silver bullet. A good campaign starts with sharp targeting and ends with robust footfall measurement among other metrics. Visit Lift comes in the latter half of this journey. It all begins with customer intelligence.

Get in touch with Lifesight to understand how customer intelligence and footfall measurement come together to help you create a powerful marketing lifecycle and navigate your customers to the outcomes your business needs.

Call the shots of your campaign with Lifesight. Request a demo.