“I think this is something everyone wants to crack,” says Malcolm Fowler.
Fowler, chief product and partnership officer for Moneris, is referring to the connection between online ad exposure and drive to store visits and purchases. The company, best known for creating technology that processes debit and credit transactions, today launched a new attribution analytics tool, Offlinx. The system will help marketers connect online activities with sales transactions, both through e-commerce and bricks-and-mortar sales.
He acknowledged that there has been plenty of innovation for attribution tools connecting digital ad exposure and e-commerce sales, but added that “the lion’s share of transactions still happen in-store.”
While some tech and marketing companies have opted to use location data, beacons and polygons to take a journey-mapping approach to attribution, Moneris is focusing on point-of-sale data.
Fowler tells MiC that despite its roots in transactional technology, Moneris has provided analytics to clients for years.
“We have, historically, provided lots of market data, and have been able to break it down and get more granular with clients when needed,” he says. Where this is new for the company, however, is the connection to ad spend.
Fowler says Moneris completed the tool over a three-year period without the help of a tech or marketing partner (although it worked with several retail clients in the beta testing phase). He says because of Moneris’ large presence in e-commerce, it has a great deal of data on purchases and browsing activity, and thus is able to connect more devices to cards when tracking purchases. All data is anonymized and kept secure.
Fowler says the genesis of the product came from the meteoric rise of online ad spend, as well as feedback from Moneris clients who said that they wanted to know the connection between online spend and in-store ROI.
For advertisers and agencies, the Offlinx dashboard will enable them to see the connections between ad exposure and purchases, while also making changes on the fly. “If you’ve paid $50,000 for an online ad and you can see that it’s leading to purchases in Ontario and B.C. but maybe not in Quebec, you’re able to change your targets accordingly.”
According to Fowler, one in every three transactions in Canada is through Moneris.
