Foursquare is expanding its Attribution Solution to be able to measure OOH ads

Foursquare, the location intelligence platform, has announced a new update to its existing Attribution Solution, which will allow businesses to measure out-of-home advertising, including ROI from billboards. Since its launch in 2016, Attribution by Foursquare has allowed brands and agencies to track digital, social, TV (linear and OTT), print, audio (streaming and terrestrial ratio), and is now expanding to OOH ads.

“No one knows location better than Foursquare. 10 years in the game, we’ve established a measured audience of 70m unique devices in the US, 10m of which are part of our first-party “always on” panel (the industrys largest), allowing us to understand how people move through the real world,” said Kyle Wendling, senior project manager, Foursquare. “From our consumer roots, we’ve grown into the most trusted independent location technology platform. Attribution is a core part of our product offering.

To track a billboard on the side of a road or highway, Foursquare Attribution will first define the specific area around each billboard from which the client’s advertisement is viewable. Then, using Foursquare’s Pilgrim technology, it can be determined when a mobile device passes through the defined area, confirming the user could see the billboard.

Lastly, Foursquare will match all exposed devices to store visits of the company being advertised. Using its machine learning methodology technology, Foursquare can then find the correlation between exposed devices and store visits, or incremental lift, giving its partners an idea of what their ad campaign has yielded.

“Foursquare can uniquely measure lift by 500+ distinct consumer factors and attributes, such as DMA, gender, age group, historical visits, loyalty to certain types of retailers and more, uncovering granular insights into the true characteristics that drive incrementality,” said Wendling. “We also help marketers unlock demographic insights about their visitors to make more strategic planning decisions and improve future campaigns.”

Additionally, Foursquare released new features that will allow advertisers to track “new customers”, or users that haven’t visited a store in the past 60 days; view in-store lift by region and state; and view lift by time of day.