This article was based on the interview with Arianna Vogel, Senior Director of Product Marketing at Foursquare by Greg Kihlström, AI and MarTech keynote speaker for The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström podcast. Listen to the original episode here:
Attribution has long been one of marketing’s thorniest challenges. With consumers increasingly shifting between devices, channels, and even physical locations, determining which strategies truly drive conversions can feel like a daunting puzzle.
As more brands embrace omnichannel approaches that blend online and offline engagement, the attribution landscape grows even more complex. Yet despite these hurdles, effectively measuring and optimizing marketing campaigns has never been more critical, especially as budgets tighten and competition for every customer intensifies.
Foursquare helped pioneer the idea of location-based marketing with its early check-in app, and it has evolved into a robust platform enabling businesses to harness the power of location intelligence and attribution. Arianna Vogel, Senior Director of Product Marketing at Foursquare, has an insider’s view on why location intelligence is so vital to modern marketers. In a recent conversation, she offered her perspective on bridging the gap between digital engagement and real-world foot traffic, why the shift to more fluid brand loyalty is raising the stakes for omnichannel measurement, and how new technologies are shaping the future of attribution. Below, we explore her insights on tackling modern attribution challenges, making location-driven campaigns work, and adopting fresh strategies that tie marketing spend to tangible results.
Confronting Complexity: Why Accurate Attribution Matters More Than Ever
The age of static customer journeys is over. As brand experiences proliferate across social media, connected TV, e-commerce, and real-world storefronts, marketing teams need to calibrate their strategies in real time. Yet, according to Arianna Vogel, these complex new dynamics haven’t changed a fundamental truth: brands continue to struggle with seeing where their marketing dollars pay off.
“The two [challenges] that immediately come to mind … are really understanding true marketing ROI … and really understanding where and how to optimize mid-campaign.”
When an organization cannot see how individual channels or touchpoints influence sales, it must rely on assumptions—leading to missed insights and inefficient spending. Vogel points to a prevalent scenario among enterprise marketers: each advertising channel generates data reports in distinct formats, with different methodologies and timescales for reporting. Lacking a unified, consistent framework, these teams often struggle to compare channel performance in any meaningful apples-to-apples way.
Take, for instance, a brand simultaneously running display ads, connected TV ads, and in-app promotions. If each channel measures success differently—impressions for digital, daypart metrics for TV, installs for in-app—how do you compare or integrate that data? And more importantly, how do you know exactly which channel combinations produce real, quantifiable lift? As Vogel explains, bridging that gap is key:
“If you’re really just thinking about … a report card after your campaign, you’re missing out on so many opportunities to optimize and drive efficiencies … while your campaign is in flight.”
In short, waiting until after the fact to do post-campaign assessments leaves money on the table. Particularly with economic uncertainty and rising customer acquisition costs, marketers must spot early signals that guide them to reallocate resources to the highest-performing channels. Along the way, they also need to deliver highly personalized experiences to keep fickle customers engaged and loyal—something that is more crucial than ever, given Vogel’s reminder that 83% of retail sales will come from in-store shopping by 2025. Those with advanced measurement frameworks stand a far better chance of capturing this in-store spend and winning over new customers.
Harnessing Real-World Behavior: The Power of Location Intelligence
For over a decade, Foursquare has been synonymous with real-world location data. While the brand started as a popular check-in app, it shifted in the early 2010s to helping marketers and enterprises leverage location-based insights. According to Vogel, location intelligence serves as a powerful differentiator precisely because it sheds light on the offline portion of the customer journey, the part that marketers frequently find most elusive.
“There’s really a disconnect between a consumer’s digital footprint and their real-world purchases … where are you actually going in the real world? Where are you actually spending?”
Understanding that physical world behavior is crucial for modern brands—particularly those with brick-and-mortar presences. With location data, a brand can see whether someone who viewed an ad online then visited a store and made a purchase. Armed with these insights, they can determine whether, for example, a social media ad displayed at lunchtime boosted foot traffic in the afternoon. Or they can see how a competitor’s loyalists behave in different regions, opening the door for targeted conquest campaigns.
Foursquare’s approach, Vogel says, rests on tying channel performance metrics to real-world behaviors in a standardized manner. The brand’s Foursquare Attribution product helps unify data from diverse marketing channels—ranging from connected TV to podcasts to programmatic digital ads—to see which exposures convert into actual store visits. A single, consistent methodology then enables an apples-to-apples comparison of which channels truly move the needle.
“When assessing campaigns, many marketers … get caught up in the cycle of comparing apples to oranges. … Technology like what we offer … can help with this because … we’re offering kind of a single unified view … across numerous different channels.”
This approach is particularly valuable for the large portion of retail spending still happening in physical locations. While digital channels do a decent job correlating online impressions with clicks and purchases, bridging that gap to offline store visits was historically a blind spot. By integrating location data, marketers can close the loop on real-world conversions and attribute them with more certainty to specific brand interactions.
Expanding Attribution: From Store Visits to Actual Sales
Although mapping foot traffic is powerful, Vogel notes that location-based metrics can and should go beyond merely counting store visits. The next logical leap is connecting those visits to actual sales—pinpointing not only who entered the store but who ultimately made a purchase.
“[You can] consider focusing your … targeting strategies towards this true intent by segmenting based on actual real-world behavior. … Where are you actually going in the real world? Where are you actually spending?”
By layering transaction data on top of visitation metrics, marketers gain a more holistic view of the customer journey. For instance, a QSR (quick-service restaurant) brand may discover that a large subset of potential patrons come in to browse or check out the new menu item but don’t order. Why not? Are promotions misaligned with in-store inventory or availability? Does the restaurant’s layout or user experience hinder conversions?
This deeper context offers valuable feedback loops, not just for marketing teams but for store managers and supply chain experts. Perhaps the store is consistently out of a key ingredient that marketing is heavily promoting, or product displays need to be repositioned. As Vogel underscores, when attribution focuses on actual transactions or basket size, new insights emerge that break down silos and encourage cross-departmental collaboration.
“With Ashley Furniture … they had historically had a hard time driving sales and connecting those sales to traditional TV advertising. … They turned to Roku to run those connected TV ads … and tapped Foursquare and Foursquare Attribution to measure the results. … That was a success story in someone taking the leap and exploring a new emerging channel.”
In that example, location-based measurement let the brand bridge the offline and online realms, seeing which audiences exposed to connected TV ads subsequently visited a showroom. More granular analysis could incorporate sales data (or at least cost-per-store-visit) to reveal the channel’s real ROI. The result? Data-driven confidence in an emerging medium and a path forward for reinvestment in future campaigns.
Strategies for Success: Staying Nimble in a Changing Landscape
While advanced attribution tools are integral, Vogel emphasizes that brands need an overarching strategy to capitalize on them. The stakes are high: in addition to changing consumer behaviors and brand loyalty shifts, new marketing channels (connected TV, streaming audio, digital out-of-home) keep emerging. Marketers who are slow to measure or optimize these new channels miss out on opportunities to test and invest early.
- Embrace a Holistic Marketing Strategy:
A single platform that can measure different channels using a unified methodology reduces complexity. This ensures marketers can compare performance fairly—letting them make reallocation decisions mid-campaign, rather than waiting for final “report cards.” - Push for Comparable Metrics:
Particularly for so-called “difficult” channels like out-of-home or connected TV, it’s easy to say measurement is too elusive. Vogel challenges that assumption: “Hold your out-of-home tactics to the same standards of measurability as you do your digital tactics. The technology is there.” By insisting on rigorous measurement across all channels, marketing leaders can compare performance consistently and avoid underreporting the impact of channels traditionally dismissed as “just for awareness.” - Tie Everything to Real-World Impact:
If your ultimate goal is driving offline sales, then your measurement must include offline metrics. Relying solely on digital proxies like clicks and website visits leaves a large portion of the journey hidden. Tools that capture visitation data and even transactional data give a fuller picture. - Adopt a “Test and Learn” Mindset:
Marketers should not only measure but also plan for rapid optimization. As Vogel points out, finding a strong measurement partner is essential, especially when venturing into emerging spaces. “Constantly having conversations internally about how to balance … granularity and scale,” as Vogel advises, helps teams refine campaigns in flight—seeing which messages resonate most and which audience segments are worth further investment. - Be Ready for Ongoing Evolution:
Looking forward, Vogel sees the roles of AI and the rise of advanced data modeling as catalysts reshaping how marketers conduct analysis: “AI is a massively emerging, rapidly emerging trend … for segmentation, customer journey analysis and measurement, campaign optimization, forecasting.” Tapping into AI to identify patterns in location data, highlight new audience segments, or predict future store visits could yield major efficiency gains. Yet success will hinge on the quality and cleanliness of first-party data, along with marketers’ willingness to experiment with new models.
At a time when retail competition is fierce, brand loyalty is increasingly tenuous, and new channels seem to pop up every quarter, it’s essential for marketers to stay disciplined in how they measure results. As Arianna Vogel explains, location intelligence is an indispensable ingredient for connecting digital and physical channels, especially for businesses with brick-and-mortar footprints that still capture the bulk of their sales offline. By integrating robust in-store metrics—everything from foot traffic to actual transaction data—marketing teams can finally see how online advertising leads to real-world outcomes.
This comprehensive attribution not only clarifies which strategies are working but also uncovers inefficiencies that can be addressed while campaigns are active. The key, Vogel suggests, is balancing a thirst for data with an agile mindset: just gathering more metrics is insufficient unless you organize and use them in a systematic way, across every channel, and are prepared to adapt quickly when fresh insights surface.
Equally important is looking ahead. With AI continuing to grow and the distribution of consumer attention evolving, no single marketing playbook will remain static for long. Brands that cultivate flexible measurement strategies—grounded in location data, real-time analysis, and cross-team collaboration—will be best positioned to withstand industry disruptions and seize new channels as they emerge. In essence, the future belongs to marketers who can integrate technology, strategic insight, and a culture of nimbleness to unify the entire customer journey, from a single screen tap to the final in-store sale.
