What if measuring the impact of digital ads on consumers’ path to purchase in brick-and-mortar stores was as simple as measuring cookies for e-commerce?

What if measuring the impact of digital ads on consumers’ path to purchase in brick-and-mortar stores was as simple as measuring cookies for e-commerce? Well now, that’s possible after the collaboration between Foursquare and Nielsen. Media Post reported, the two recently joined forces in an effort to create a usable digital ad to sales methodology and tracking system. Combing Nielson’s digital measurement tool and Foursquare’s attribution technology may be a potential solution to this long time challenge.

In the old days, yesterday, before this  collaboration, marketers had to go to each provider individually to either obtain information on foot-traffic or to obtain information about in-store spending. Now that the two are connected, however, we are hoping to obtain insights into consumer behavior and how digital ads draw them to physical stores.

This new function works by measuring consumers’ location data via their mobile phones. This way, foot traffic and spending can be more accurately linked to digital ads at offline locations.

This is major news, considering only 8% of consumer spending takes place online, while the majority of the rest occurs in stores. But now, according to Foursquare CEO Jeff Glueck, “marketers will be able to measure customer conversion at every step of the way—from ad impression to store visit to product purchase through Nielsen sales lift measurement with Foursquare’s foot traffic data—and make more informed decisions on ad spend using this analysis.”

So if you’ve gotten this far you may be thinking “there are other companies that do this” and you would be right. However, there are catches – the sample size. All of the providers at this point that are offering similar solutions have to be able to obtain massive sample sizes that preferably span across multiple locations. Thus, making this type of tracking a non starter. While this partnership is completely new and there are many unknowns, it is exciting to see these two come together. With fingers crossed, there won’t be all of the hidden catches like there are on your cell phone plan.