Anne Lise, VP Sales at Ad4Screen, hosted a conference dedicated to drive-to-store strategies, with Guillaume Berdzinski, Traffic Manager at Jules, and Florence Olaru, Commercial Director at Relatia.
Physical stores were hit particularly hard by the COVID-19 pandemic, and the impact is still being felt today. The challenge for brands is therefore to use drive-to-store strategies to bring customers and prospects back into stores.
Way2Go is Relatia’s drive-to-store solution, designed to address the challenges of generating in-store footfall. Relatia supports its clients from strategy through execution, combining two core areas of expertise: UX and mobile media.
Talk to Relatia’s experts about your Way2Go campaigns
How did Jules come to adopt drive-to-store, and why has it become essential?
Jules began testing drive-to-store campaigns on Google, Facebook, and Waze — primarily from a branding perspective — in 2019, using Google Ads to track store visits. While these initial tests provided some insights, the measurement approach did not allow the brand to draw sufficiently actionable conclusions from its campaigns.
In 2020, drive-to-store became a strategic priority for the brand. However, it was only after stores fully reopened that Jules significantly scaled its investment in the channel, given that the group’s business remains largely driven by its physical stores.
The objective was therefore twofold: generate store visits while gaining more actionable insights than in previous campaigns.
To achieve this, the retailer partnered with Relatia to deploy its Way2Go solution.
How does Way2Go help advertisers build drive-to-store campaigns today? What has changed since COVID-19?
At Relatia, we believe that the success of any activation ultimately depends on the user experience. The objective is to capture attention, create engagement, and guide users towards conversion, all through their mobile device.
Way2Go’s strength lies in combining UX and performance. Every element of the experience is designed to optimize conversion throughout the customer journey.
Following a particularly challenging period marked by repeated lockdowns, retailers were severely impacted, and advertisers’ priorities and decision-making processes have evolved significantly.
Before the crisis, many advertisers were hesitant to invest in drive-to-store campaigns because they lacked confidence in their ability to collect, interpret, and activate relevant data.
During the crisis, advertisers had to make difficult choices, reallocating budgets towards more immediately measurable performance channels such as SEA, Facebook, and affiliate marketing.
Today, there is a clear appetite for testing drive-to-store strategies and integrating them into always-on plans. Advertisers have also developed a stronger understanding of tracking and data solutions.
Through Way2Go, the objective is to engage audiences with dynamic, entertaining, and interactive creative experiences that ultimately drive qualified traffic into stores.
How does drive-to-store fit into Jules’ broader digital strategy?
Today, drive-to-store plays several roles within Jules’ digital strategy. Way2Go provides additional support during key commercial moments, while also helping boost individual stores that need to increase footfall and sales.
The channel therefore complements other acquisition levers, helping guide customers throughout their journey and connect digital interactions with physical visits.
At the same time, Jules feeds as much offline data as possible into its marketing ecosystem to maximize campaign performance.
How does Relatia tailor drive-to-store strategies for each advertiser?
For this type of activation, the creative experience should be the first priority, as it represents the initial point of contact with the user. The objective is to make an impression through a simple, personalized journey, relevant messaging, and engaging mechanics that encourage interaction.
The next step is to diversify acquisition channels and test as many relevant levers as possible, programmatic, SMS, email, social media, and others, before scaling the channels that deliver the strongest results.
Targeting is another key component. Depending on the campaign, this can include geofencing, demographic targeting, or declared audience data.
Jules also goes a step further by targeting complementary or affinity-based points of interest. The brand identified a strong affinity among its customers for categories such as organic products and gaming. This insight enabled Jules to refine its targeting further, following A/B tests that initially challenged some of the team’s assumptions.
Campaign clickers can also be retained as audiences and re-engaged in future campaigns, ensuring that subsequent activations focus on users who have already demonstrated an interest in the brand.
What is the difference between geotargeting and geofencing?
Geofencing delivers an advertising message in real time to a user who enters a defined area around a store. This requires the user to have previously consented to sharing their location data.
The principle is straightforward: advertisers define a geographic area around a point of sale, and users entering that area can be served an ad encouraging them to visit the store when they are using a relevant app. Because it enables highly contextual, real-time activation, Relatia particularly recommends geofencing for drive-to-store campaigns.
Geotargeting, by contrast, relies on declared or inferred geographic information, such as a user’s home location. Ads are then served to audiences matching predefined geographic criteria.
How does drive-to-store measurement work? How can you distinguish Way2Go-driven visits from organic store visits?
Relatia works with independent measurement partners to measure in-store visits in a neutral and objective way. This avoids any potential conflict of interest when evaluating campaign performance.
The measurement approach depends on the advertiser’s objectives and requirements. Methods include:
- GPS-based measurement: as with Jules, Relatia can work with an external measurement partner to match users who were exposed to an ad with subsequent visits to stores in the relevant area.
- In-store measurement devices: a visit can be counted when an exposed user enters a store with Wi-Fi or Bluetooth enabled, depending on the measurement solution deployed.
Incremental visits can also be measured by creating control groups and calculating uplift. This makes it possible to compare users who were exposed to the campaign with similar users who were not, and isolate the incremental impact generated by the campaign.
New certification standards are also emerging in the drive-to-store market, including the MMA’s Drive-to-Trust framework, designed to give advertisers greater confidence in the reliability and transparency of drive-to-store measurement.
Watch the full Drive to Store session: bring customers into your stores
