5 Ways To Measure Foot Traffic From Influencer Campaigns

Picture this; You’ve tracked down the best influencers to promote your brand and product. You’ve gone through the vetting, contracting, reviewing, and launching of your campaign. You’ve even set up a solid amplification strategy that’s helping move customers down the marketing funnel. You read our handy guides on measuring roi for influencer marketing, and understanding offline conversion tracking, and now you want to understand the real world impact of your efforts. What was the Return-on-Investment (ROI), and if you’re a quick-service restaurant (QSR), omni-channel retailer or exclusively a brick-and-mortar, you ultimately care about how these marketing efforts translate into getting traffic to your location.

Impact can be measured in various ways and extends beyond primary KPIs. For instance, if an awareness campaign also drives purchases, that’s still a meaningful outcome. More importantly, if the ultimate goal is to bring people into your store for the full brand experience or final sale, foot traffic becomes the key measure of impact. Impact isn’t just something to track—it’s something to create. How you drive impact is just as important as how you measure it. Let’s explore strategies to both drive and measure foot traffic in your influencer and amplification campaigns.

Methods & Tools to Measure Foot Traffic

Here are five ways to measure foot traffic for your campaigns, ranked from least effective to most effective, being defined by quality, efficiency, and ease of use:

5. Customer Surveys (The Old-School Guessing Game)

It’s as simple as just asking! Determine a method to survey store customers to find out where they heard about you, easy as that. One simple method is adding a question to your POS at checkout. However, this method does leave a lot of room for error, from customers not remembering accurately to missing customers. Set up can also be daunting; are we going to have employees ask face-to-face, is this a survey on their receipt? So many additional questions and factors come into play that this old-school method of measuring impact probably peaked in high school. 

Verdict: Better than nothing, but don’t bet your budget on it.

4. In-Store Redemptions and Offers (The Incentive Play)

This one works similarly to the first, but just slightly less contact and intrusion. Instead of directly asking customers why they’re visiting, in-store redemptions and offers act as a built-in label, identifying those who enter and use the coupons. This would become easier to track, but still leaves a large amount of the lift on the customer. Customers will need to remember their redemption and offer coupons, and be tasked with coming into the store within a specific amount of time. This also doesn’t account for users who are still further away in the customer journey. We all have those stores where we walk in and don’t buy anything, only to spend the next week regretting our frugality. 

Verdict: Good for tracking purchases, but not the full picture.

3. Geofencing Ads (Precision Targeting with a Side of Data)

This option speaks more to the amplification element of influencer campaigns. When you’re setting up your paid amplification campaigns, it’s as simple as being precise with your location targeting. Determining how far customers will travel lets you target them precisely, creating a virtual boundary for your ads. From here you can use location-based attribution tools to measure just how many people ended up in-store from your amplification efforts. A few caveats – first is identifying just what that fence’s parameters are, you don’t want it too wide and wasteful, nor do you want it too tight and precise, leaving sales (or in our case shoes) on the table.

Verdict: Great for targeted campaigns, but needs careful execution.

2. Location-Based Attribution Tools (LBATs) (The MVP of Foot Traffic Measurement)

The belle of the ball, the toast of the town, the queen bee of measuring foot traffic (LBAT), more commonly known as Location-Based Attribution Tools. If we haven’t made it clear yet, this is the best way to go about tracking offline impact from your influencer and paid amplification campaigns. At its simplest form, this is relegated to ingesting offline purchase data into your respective ads platforms, which will cross reference users who have received ads with those who have made purchases IRL. Off the bat it’s clear that this is limited to those who make purchases, not those who have been swayed into perusing by their favorite suave tech guru, or those who were convinced to check out a storefront by the paid amplification campaign that pushed TheTechInfluencer’s promo to you because you live next door. 

I’m probably dating myself with this reference, but there was a time when everyone was “checking in” every time they stepped into a cool shop or restaurant–this was how I first heard of Foursquare. This is still around, though now it’s through a subsidiary of Foursquare, Swarm. Foursquare now partly centers itself around its location technology solutions, and for our intents and purposes this is used to track how digital ads drive real-world visits to physical locations.

Foursquare works by collecting anonymized location data from mobile devices via its own apps (like the aforementioned Swarm) and its SDK integrated into third-party apps. With this data, Foursquare is able to user-match with ad impressions from digital campaigns. Though there’s plenty of more complicated technical details, including control groups, visit detection technology, and accounting for historical visit behaviors to reduce false positives, that’s the gist of it. However, Foursquare can be considered an outdated measure and an extensive additional cost for your campaigns

Verdict: Highly effective, but not the final boss.

1. Placer.Ai (The Gold Standard for Location Intelligence)

Next up is our personal favorite–Placer.ai is the most advanced location analytics platform. With an uncompromising commitment to privacy, Placer empowers organizations with robust and accurate data describing physical locations, the people interacting with them, and the markets they inhabit.

Placer allows AdParlor to analyze consumer behavior, understand market trends, optimize our marketing and amplification strategies, and measure impact unlike ever before. But that’s only the beginning. The data is impressive, but what matters most is how you use those insights–that’s where the real payoff lies. For example, a Miami restaurant was struggling with declining visitation despite heavy tourist traffic. By using Placer.ai’s insights to identify key local customers and refine their targeting strategy, the restaurant boosted its ad campaigns performance and increased foot traffic by 37% in just two months.

This is just one example of how Placer.ai is an invaluable tool for understanding the foot traffic that matters most to your business, and how AdParlor can leverage that data to maximize influencer marketing campaigns. It’s one big funnel cake with a high ROI stuffed in the center!

Verdict: The ultimate game-changer for influencer marketing ROI.

Wrapping It Up: What Else Should You Consider?

We’ve listed some great tools, flexed our own muscles, connection, and hopefully given you a hankering for ice cream along the way. So what better way to wrap this cinnamon roll up but with some additional factors to consider. First and foremost is attribution windows! Attribution windows refer to the period in which the impact of your campaign is measured to determine if it led to a specific user action. For example, if a customer sees an ad on Monday and then heads over to the store on Friday to make a purchase, your attribution window will determine if this was a result of your marketing efforts. It’s important to make sure you set an attribution type and window that can accurately capture your marketing efforts.

Measuring offline impact is just the beginning. To truly optimize your influencer marketing strategy, keep these final pro tips in mind:

• 📌 Set the right attribution window – Define how long after seeing an ad/post you’ll count a visit as a conversion.
• 📌 Beware of tracking gaps – Offline data ingestion, geofencing accuracy, and human behavior all leave room for discrepancies.
• 📌 Paid + Influencer = Power Move – Influencer content + paid amplification = the best shot at maximizing measurable impact.
• 📌 Don’t DIY if you don’t have to – Attribution is tricky, but that’s where we come in. AdParlor specializes in merging influencer magic with data-driven precision.

Ready to Turn Influence into Impact?

Want to see how AdParlor has done this for top brands? Check out these case studies:

🔥 Influencers increase awareness of local store openings
🍔 Custom influencer strategy drives QSR promo awareness
🛍️ Leveraging Creator Storytelling With Paid Amplification to Drive In-Store Sales

Measuring foot traffic from influencer campaigns isn’t just about tracking—it’s about optimizing. With the right tools (and the right team), you can turn digital buzz into real-world sales. So, are you ready to make influence count where it matters? Let’s talk. 🚀