INTAGE launches Sales Impact Scope, which uses the national retail panel SRI+® to measure the effectiveness of YouTube advertising on bricks-and-mortar sales.

INTAGE Inc. (HQ: Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo; President: Ayumi Higaki; hereafter INTAGE) has launched Sales Impact Scope, a service for measuring the effectiveness of YouTube ads on offline shop sales.

What is Sales Impact Scope?

This solution is a service for measuring the advertising impact of YouTube placements on retail sales. It combines the SRI+^® (nationwide retailer panel survey provided by INTAGE, based on the sales performance of up to 6,000 shops in Japan), with statistical method Causal Impact (published as open source by Google), to estimate the incremental lift in offline sales from online advertising. It provides a framework for more precise and reliable hypothesis/effectiveness testing compared to conventional methods.

Background

With the recent digitalisation of the Internet, internet advertising expenditure has increased year on year, increasing the importance of measuring online advertising effectiveness. Combined with the fact that many consumer goods still rely on retail sales, there is a strong need to visualise the impact of online advertising on offline sales. However, with the accelerating trend towards stronger privacy, including 3rd party cookie regulations, and stronger restrictions on the use of data linked to individuals, it has remained highly challenging to verify the effects of online initiatives on offline purchases. One solution to this problem is the Sales Impact Scope.

Data

The solution is based on the SRI+ (nationwide retail shop panel survey), which is highly trusted by many consumer goods manufacturers and used as an industry standard for analysis. SRI+ boasts the largest number of sample designs and chain coverage of any retail shop panel in Japan^*1 and continuously collects daily sales information from approximately 6,000 shops nationwide, including supermarkets, convenience stores, home centres/discount stores, drugstores and speciality shops. This data is used as shop sales data. The use of SRI+ data makes it possible to visualise the incremental lift from measures in line with practical KPIs.

Analysis Method

The solution uses Causal Impact, an open source statistical method published by Google, to estimate the effects of advertising measures^*2. As a prerequisite, the data is divided into ad-placement and non-ad-placement areas so that the waveform of the sales data approaches homogeneity^*3. The system then estimates the ‘hypothetical sales without advertising’ in the advertising areas based on sales trends in the non-advertising areas and calculates the difference with actual sales as an incremental lift. This enables a more precise measurement of advertising effectiveness than with other methods.

Future Prospects

“Sales Impact Scope” aims to expand to other online advertising and offline measures apart from YouTube in the future.

In addition to this solution, INTAGE also offers numerous other solutions such as ‘Brand Impact Scope’ and ‘Marketing Mix Modeling’. We can support your business in evaluating your marketing initiatives and improving return on investments through the PDCA cycle by combining various of our solutions for a multifaceted analysis according to your analysis objective.

*1 As of December 2024.
*2 https://github.com/google/tfp-causalimpact
*3 SRI+ is provided in regular wide-area segmentation. Logic for division by delivery/non-delivery area is created exclusively for this solution.