Martech: Martech is Marketing Logo
  • Topics
    Digital Transformation
    Marketing Operations
    Data
    Customer & Digital Experience
    Performance Marketing
    Marketing Management
    Special Reports
    MarTech Topics
  • Conference
  • Webinars
  • Intelligence Reports
  • White Papers
  • What is MarTech
    Mission
    Staff
    Newsletter
    Search Engine Land
    Third Door Media

Processing...Please wait.

MarTech » Performance Marketing » Snap acquires Placed to better measure in-app ads to in-store sales

Snap acquires Placed to better measure in-app ads to in-store sales

Placed is able to attribute brand’s digital, TV and out-of-home campaigns to store visits and in-store sales.

Tim Peterson on June 5, 2017 at 9:10 pm

The interior of Snapchat's headquarters in Venice, California.

Snapchat’s parent company, Snap, has acquired location analytics firm Placed, a company spokesperson said on Monday, confirming a GeekWire report published earlier in the day.

The spokesperson declined to say how much Snap paid for Placed — Bloomberg reported the price to be $125 million — but it’s easy to see how buying Placed — which measures store visits and offline revenue generated by digital, TV and out-of-home ads — could pay off for Snap.

Advertisers like Procter & Gamble and Unilever are pressuring digital ad sellers like Google, Facebook and Snapchat to prove that the money brands spend on ads results in people spending money on the brands’ products. As a result, Google, Facebook and Snapchat have stepped up their measurement capabilities, especially when it comes to measuring if a digital ad led to a real-world purchase.

In April, Snapchat began rolling out its own online-to-offline measurement product called Snap to Store. Through the product, Snapchat is able to recognize when a person is using the app in a marketer-specific location, like a store, restaurant or movie theater, and then check if that person had previously been served any ads from that brand on Snapchat.

Buying Placed appears to reinforce what Snapchat is already doing with a team and technology that have been offering this type of ad attribution since 2011. According to Placed’s own description of its methodology, the company’s attribution measurements work similarly to Snapchat’s approach without being limited to Snapchat’s ads.

Placed has its own audience of people who opt in to share their location with Placed plus a third-party audience. By continuously tracking people’s location and cross-referencing that information with its database of businesses’ locations, operating hours and other information, the company estimates where a person is likely to be, and then — through deals with ad buyers like DigitasLBi, Essence Digital, Horizon Media and IPG Mediabrands and ad sellers like Conde Nast, Hearst, Pandora and The Weather Company — checks if that person had seen a digital ad, TV commercial or billboard for the business operating that location. After doing that for enough people and comparing visitors who did see an ad with those who did not, Placed calculates the extent to which seeing an ad increased a person’s likelihood to visit and then factors in a location’s sales to calculate the extent to which those ad exposures increased the location’s revenue.

“Over the past 12 months, Placed has measured more than $500 million in media spend to store visits, across thousands of campaigns and hundreds of partners,” Placed CEO David Shim said in a blog post published on Monday announcing the deal.

Placed will continue to operate as a separate company, with all of its 100-plus employees offered the opportunity to stay on post-acquisition, and Shim will report to Snap’s chief strategy officer, Imran Khan, according to the Snap spokesperson. As a result, advertisers will still be able to use Placed to measure the store visits and offline revenue stemming from their ads running on and off Snapchat.

That could concern some advertisers and publishers alike, who may not want Snapchat’s sales team to be able to use that data to price their pitches and poach their clients. But, at least for now, Snap will physically and technically keep Snapchat’s and Placed’s advertiser data separate, the spokesperson said.


Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily MarTech. Staff authors are listed here.


New on MarTech

    How clean, organized and actionable is your data?
    Replacement Survey: The top 5 solutions replaced
    What’s the biggest hidden secret in Google Ads?
    Native video tops social media in brand awareness study
    Worsening economy has more shoppers getting online info before making in-store purchases

About The Author

Tim Peterson
Tim Peterson, Third Door Media's Social Media Reporter, has been covering the digital marketing industry since 2011. He has reported for Advertising Age, Adweek and Direct Marketing News. A born-and-raised Angeleno who graduated from New York University, he currently lives in Los Angeles. He has broken stories on Snapchat's ad plans, Hulu founding CEO Jason Kilar's attempt to take on YouTube and the assemblage of Amazon's ad-tech stack; analyzed YouTube's programming strategy, Facebook's ad-tech ambitions and ad blocking's rise; and documented digital video's biggest annual event VidCon, BuzzFeed's branded video production process and Snapchat Discover's ad load six months after launch. He has also developed tools to monitor brands' early adoption of live-streaming apps, compare Yahoo's and Google's search designs and examine the NFL's YouTube and Facebook video strategies.

Related Topics

Performance Marketing

Get the daily newsletter digital marketers rely on.

Processing...Please wait.

See terms.

ATTEND OUR EVENTS The MarTech Conference logo.

September 28-29, 2022: Fall

Start Training Now: Master Classes

Start Discovering Now: Spring



The SMX Conference logo.

Start Training Now:: SMX Advanced

November 14-15, 2022: SMX Next

March 8-9, 2022: Master Classes

Webinars

Agencies: Grow Revenue Streams Through Web Accessibility & Compliance

Protect Your Paid Advertising Spend Against Ad Fraud and Invalid Traffic

Build an Integrated Search Strategy Across Google, Amazon and YouTube

See More Webinars
Intelligence Reports

Enterprise SEO Platforms: A Marketer’s Guide

Enterprise Identity Resolution Platforms

Email Marketing Platforms: A Marketer’s Guide

See More Intelligence Reports
Featured White Paper

Site Search 101

See More Whitepapers

Receive daily marketing news & analysis.

Processing...Please wait.

Topics

  • Transformation
  • Operations
  • Data
  • Experience
  • Performance
  • Management
  • All Topics
  • Home

Our Events

  • MarTech
  • Search Marketing Expo - SMX

About

  • What is MarTech
  • Contact
  • Privacy
  • Terms Of Use
  • Marketing Opportunities
  • Staff

Follow Us

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn
  • Newsletters
  • RSS

© 2022 Third Door Media, Inc. All rights reserved.