A holiday campaign returned a 4:1 ROAS. 87% of conversions were in-store walk-throughs matched to verified visits.
The challenge
Holiday season is when mall retailers fight hardest for attention, and Express needed proof its digital spend moved people into stores.
The first gap was store traffic at 19 mall locations. Express needed more holiday foot traffic at its 19 stores inside malls and outlet centers, without giving up online sales.
A second challenge was no line from ad to store visit. Its prior advertising was judged on e-commerce conversions. Express could not attribute store visits to specific digital efforts.
The remaining issue was targeting without consumer preference data. Express's previous targeting lacked segmentation by consumer preference. Spend was not focused on high-intent shoppers.
The solution
Use retailer shopper data: starting from the mall's own shoppers. Express ran the campaign through a mall-operator retail media program. The malls' WiFi was integrated with Adentro, so shoppers at those properties were identified by actual visits. That gave Express an audience anchored to the malls where its 19 stores operate.
Build a behavioral audience: finding the shoppers most like Express customers. Adentro built prospecting audiences modeled on Express's existing customer profiles and mall shoppers through the Affinity Network. The Affinity Network's 100M+ profiles layered on shopping affinities, customer personas and purchase history. Conquest targeting added shoppers who had visited competing fashion retailers. These people were already shopping the category.
Activate paid audiences: holiday creative where fashion gets discovered. Express ran those audiences on Instagram feed placements. Creative balanced holiday promotions with brand storytelling. It was built to send people to the mall stores, not just the website.
Match observed visits: measuring the store and the site together. Walk-Through Rate™ matched people exposed to ads against device-verified visits at the 19 Express stores. A pixel tracked online sales from the same campaign. Campaign reporting showed both in real time, so the team refined targeting and creative during the flight.
Why the combination mattered
The mall operator's audience data anchored shoppers to relevant properties; Affinity Network added fashion-category and competitor-visit context; Instagram carried the creative; Walk-Through Rate™ matched exposures to store visits; and pixel reporting supplied online sales. Store walk-throughs and purchases are different outcome types.
The results
- 4:1 overall ROAS
- 5,896 walk-throughs matched to verified visits
- 909 online sales tracked via pixel
- 87% of conversions were in-store walk-throughs
- 2.2M reach and 10M impressions