Is it possible to measure shopper and ecommerce campaign ROI?

David Harker • January 29, 2021

The massive changes in media consumption and shopping behaviour, driven by on demand TV, the proliferation of smartphone usage, the explosion of digital communication channels and recent pandemic related lockdowns has created new challenges and opportunities for marketers seeking to engage effectively with their audience.

BASE Technologies - Is it possible to measure shopper and ecommerce campaign ROI?
In a world where TV and other “traditional” broadcast media is getting less and less cut-through, brands are looking for more effective ways to engage with shoppers along their path-to-purchase. Engaging with the “shopper” at retail and through geo-targeted activity is one such big opportunity. Investment in this sector (known by the industry as Shopper Marketing) continues to grow year on year as brand owners seek a better and more clearly attributable return on investment for their marketing spend.

Investing along the path-to-purchase comes with challenges

• Where do I invest? 
• What do I invest in? 
• What do I say at which touchpoints? 
• How do I know if I am getting a good return for my money? 
• How many consumers do I reach and influence? 
• What’s the impact of this activity on my sales relative to other more traditional methods such as promotions or investment in broadcast media?

BASE Technologies shopping cart for shopper marketing campaign ROI investment

 There’s so many options for investment - which work and how would I know?

Retail Media and location specific media executed at the right place(s) along the shopper journey has been proven to demonstrate a more attributable link between activation and purchase – sales growth.   

To find the answer to the question “what works” and identify where best to invest to encourage a shopper, either in-store or online, to add a product to their basket requires a number of conditions to be in place: 


Conditions to enable effective measurement of shopper / e-commerce ROI

  1. Understanding at the most granular level – what activity has been executed against which target audience, in which media channel, over what time period, on which brands and specific products, against which objective, and in which location (be it region, town, store).
  2. The ability to look at results at the most granular level – item, store, day EPOS sales data 
  3. The ability to match campaign data at scale with the EPOS data and be able to discern the differences. 

If you can ascertain what combination of what activity was executed uniquely in which environment (eg store, digital shelf) and match this with sales data then you are able to attribute which activities changed consumer behaviour and measure the impact. To do this sounds easy, but in reality requires complex data science; factoring for multiple activation investments, all handled at the same time and in the same way; and deep contextual knowledge of the media and retail industry to ensure the validity of the analytics.

BASE Technologies consumer insight for measuring shopper marketing campaigns

Powering Commercial Effectiveness – through insight

At BASE® Technologies, we have taken all these factors into account and created an end-to-end platform we call BASE® Brands. This allows our clients to easily lay-down their plans at the right level of detail and match this with the most granular EPOS data to enable measurement of complex e-commerce, in-store and digital campaigns at scale. The solution also allows them to align their plans across their organisation with ease, bring clarity and control to budget management, and easily leverage the insights from the measurement to inform their future investment choices.  

Our marketing planning and analytics platform, BASE® Brands, is the integrated solution used by leading brand owners including Heineken and Birds Eye to drive consistent improvement in Shopper Marketing ROI as well as more efficient operations, not just in Shopper, but across the whole “Go-To-Market” operation.


If you’d like to find out more, then please do get in touch as we’d love to have a chat with you.

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