The challenge
Gelson's invested steadily in online marketing to new prospects but was unsure it could raise visit velocity or average ticket size.
It could not attribute Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok campaigns to in-store traffic and sales.
It also lacked tools to segment and target casual shoppers who could become frequent visitors.
The solution
1. Guest WiFi: Collect first-party shopper profiles
Gelson's turned on Adentro's secure WiFi portal, and Guest WiFi began collecting first-party customer profiles immediately. Customer Data tied each shopper's online journey to their in-store visits.
2. Audience Segmentation: Isolate the casual shopper
Visit data identified casual shoppers by how often they came in. Gelson's targeted that group with social ads built to drive repeat visits.
3. Affinity Network: Model audiences on the best customers
The top audience was a prospecting audience modeled through the Affinity Network on POS data from the customers who spend the most and visit most often. A second audience was modeled on all customers, and a retargeting audience ran alongside.
Ads ran on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok, with recipe, sale, and food-item creative split by age: 21-44 and 45+.
4. Lift study: Test visits against a control group
Gelson's split casual shoppers into a test group that saw the ads and a control group that did not. Walk-Through Rate™ matched exposed shoppers to verified visits.
Only this exposed-versus-control study supports the visit-velocity lift result.
5. POS matchback: Match social results to register sales
In 2023, social campaign results were matched to POS data to report revenue and ROAS.
The results
- 204:1 social ROAS, matched to POS data in 2023
- 9.42% visit velocity lift, casual shoppers versus a control group over 60 days
- $0.28 cost per walk-through, for social campaigns
- 36K+ first-party contacts collected
- 498K+ additional contacts recognized by Adentro
- 37,575,000+ impressions
- $175K increase in weekly sales over the same 60-day period