Christmas is the most wonderful time of the year. From lit-up streets, dressed-up window displays and seasonal offers, it’s a feast for consumers’ eyes and an undeniable business opportunity for brands that generated nearly £100 billion in the UK in 2019 alone.
During the holiday season, shoppers flock to the streets to find the perfect gift for their nearest and dearest, and enjoy the Christmas spirit. In 2019, the Crown Estate didn’t want to miss out on this opportunity to see busy and thriving stores in London’s Regent Street.
The Crown Estate partnered with The Grove Media agency and Locala to promote Regent Street’s Christmas Lights switch-on show and shopping evenings. To help customers enjoy a memorable Christmas shopping experience, Locala came up with a custom drive-to-store strategy leveraging mobile ad formats to interact with potential shoppers.
Locala targeted affluent users interested in retail and dining in high-income areas around Greater London. We combined contextual and location targeting strategies to reach the right audience at the most suitable time. We targeted both relevant contextual IAB categories – such as Shopping, Fashion, Food & Drink, Arts & Entertainment, Hobbies & Interests – and high-income areas based on ONS location data. To ensure precise and accurate targeting, we leveraged Locala Geo-Accuracy – our proprietary GPS data filter – to pinpoint customers most likely to convert to a store visit.
Locala used a combination of banner, MPU and interstitial HTML5 formats to broaden The Crown Estate’s advertising reach and optimize towards the best return on ad spend while diversifying media activations. Throughout this month-long campaign, we combined our advanced location targeting capabilities and Fusio, our proprietary drive-to-store platform, to deliver a store locator leveraging users’ real-time location to display a live map with walking or driving directions to Regent Street.
At Locala, we don’t believe in being judge and jury of our own performance. So, we leveraged third party visitation data from independent partner Adsquare to measure visits to Regent Street stores. These results were integrated into our platform to optimize the campaign in real time towards more store visits.
The Crown Estate drive-to-store campaign generated outstanding business results. With 1.44 million impressions fully rendered in brand-safe environments, the campaign led to 2,820 in-store visits, among which over 600 were incremental visits directly attributable to our advertising activations. This translated into an impressive 29% visitation uplift and a staggering 80% conversion rate.
When it comes to visit distribution, the best performing day was Saturday with 18% of total in-store visits, and 5PM was the most popular time to visit overall. On average, shoppers converted to store visits within 2 days. Our algorithm optimized towards the banner format, with over 600,000 impressions and 1,500 clicks, reaching the right customers at the time they were most likely to convert and visit Regent Street.