Dive Brief:

• Pandora has partnered with Foursquare to measure how digital ads impact offline sales and brick-and-mortar store visits, according to a blog post by Foursquare.
• Pandora turned to Foursquare to help its advertisers in the retail and fast food sectors better understand the offline impact of their ads. Both Subway and the Connecticut casino Mohegan Sun are testing their Pandora campaigns across ad formats including audio, video and display ads using the Attribution by Foursquare measurement service.
• Attribution by Foursquare, which was released last year, provides data like store visits, devices reached and return on ad spend, as well as audience insights like geography, age, gender and interests. The data are based on the platform's 2.5 million users who opted-in to always share location data with the app, according to Adweek.

Dive Insight:

Given its large panel of users who have opted-in for always-on location sharing, Foursquare has become an early leader in offline attribution for digital campaigns with deals already in place with Nielsen and Snapchat to improve location-based targeting. Though the Attribution by Foursquare tool was released just over a year ago, it's growing relatively quickly. The company has 125 partners and brands using the tool, up from 55 at launch, and the foot traffic panel grew from 1.3 million users in February 2016 to 2.5 million this month, according to Business Insider.

The partnership highlights the growing importance of tying non-product digital ads to in-store sales, which is a tricky process, but one that's been a long-standing goal for marketers with roots in both spaces. Marketers want this information because most consumers today begin their shopping journey online through ads, social media or browsing their favorite websites, but don't immediately make a purchase. Many prefer to actually buy the product in stores, which creates a challenge in properly giving credit to channels that impacted a buyer's journey. 

Currently, most marketers measure using first- or last-touch attribution models where they assign 100% of the credit to either the first or last ad exposure. As a result, most channels don't get enough credit in their contributions to a consumer's buying journey, and this method doesn't consider offline visits or sales, an added challenge. This isn't the first location data partnership Pandora has made. It teamed with Placed a few years ago and has worked with other similar firms as well, according to Adweek.