As a brand that relies heavily on in-store traffic and sales, Sunglass Hut (SGH) faces typical retail challenges: reduced foot traffic, online giants like Amazon, and price-cutting resellers. Quantifying digital’s influence on in-store was a critical missing link.
Initially, the primary objective was to grow SGH’s ecommerce business, but as the team worked together it became clear that they had the opportunity to take on the even bigger challenge: showing the cause-and-effect connection between digital marketing and in-store traffic.
Working closely with Google and iProspect, SGH used a mix of attribution technology, geo-testing, CRM and store sales data, along with third-party beta tests to correlate digital media to in-store visits. They aggregated and anonymized the data, ran it through third-party tools, and then - fully acknowledging the data loss, assumptions, and need for extrapolation - combined the process output with insights about Google’s in-store sales attribution. They built a model that used a multiplier to more accurately gauge how digital dollars impact offline sales.