How Foot-Traffic Attribution Works: From Opted-In Signals to Store Visits

Digital reporting is very good at counting what happens on a screen: impressions, clicks, video completes. But for most brands the outcome that matters happens off the screen: someone walks into a store, a dealership, a restaurant. Foot-traffic attribution exists to connect those two worlds, and because it gets invoked loosely, it is worth explaining exactly how it works.

It starts with consent, not coordinates

Attribution is only as trustworthy as the data behind it. Our measurement is built on an opted-in panel: across Canada, more than 9 million mobile advertising IDs (MAIDs) share geo-location signals with explicit consent, generating 120+ location data points per user per day. Opted-in matters twice over: it is what Quebec’s Law 25 era demands, and it is what makes the panel stable enough to measure against month after month.

From raw coordinates to store visits

A stream of coordinates is not a visit. Turning one into the other takes three filters:

• Place definition: each measured location is mapped as a real building footprint or polygon, not a radius that swallows the parking lot next door.
• Dwell time: a device that lingers inside the polygon for minutes is a visit; one that drives past in seconds is not.
• Accuracy filtering: signals with weak GPS precision are discarded rather than guessed at.

What survives those filters is a defensible count of devices that genuinely showed up at the places a campaign was meant to drive them to.

Exposed versus control: measuring lift, not coincidence

Counting visits from people who saw an ad is not enough. Some of them were coming anyway. Real attribution compares the visit rate of the exposed group against a matched control group of similar devices that never saw the campaign. The difference between the two is incremental lift: the visits the media actually caused. It is the same logic our brand lift studies apply to awareness and consideration, pointed at doors instead of survey answers.

Questions to ask any measurement partner

• How was consent captured for the location panel, and can you show it?
• How large is the panel in Canada specifically, not globally?
• What dwell-time and accuracy thresholds define a visit?
• Is lift measured against a matched control group, or just counted?
• Can results be broken out by region, creative and channel?

Foot-traffic attribution and brand lift studies are part of every measurement conversation we have. If a campaign is supposed to move people in the physical world, the reporting should prove it did.