Foot traffic is a media outcome.Fig. 1
The Omnichannel Desk
Pillar one of three
Count the door.
You can quote your ROAS. The store-visit line takes more digging, and it's the one your floor actually feels. The Omnichannel Desk buys media that fills the floor, then reads that line beside your online revenue.
- Search & Shopping campaigns
- Performance Max with store goals & digital coupon
- Local Inventory Ads
- Business Profile & local search
- Paid social & geofenced display
- YouTube, CTV & OTT video
Media buys and performance marketing run on the LocaliQ platform. Retail business intelligence and digital strategy by Chris Gardner, DMC.
Store Visits
A modelled line, set up before launch week. The number your floor feels, and it sits inside the blended read.
Blended Return
Online revenue and store revenue on the same page, so no channel takes sole credit.
Cost per Visit
A trendline an owner can argue with. And should.
Mon.
The Weekly Read
Last week held against the calendar. What sold, what walked in, what it cost.
Wed.
The Tuning
Budgets follow the sell-through. Winners fed, laggards cut.
Thu.
The Look-Ahead
Next week on the retail calendar, staged before it arrives.
Fri.
The Note
What changed and why, in owner's English. Short on purpose.
I.
Draw the Trade Area
Start at the door and work outward. The desk draws your trade area from drive time, never from a tidy circle on a map. Fifteen minutes in Barrie covers ground that fifteen minutes in Toronto does not.
Furniture pulls from further out than apparel. A destination showroom can justify a wide ring. A strip-mall boutique usually can't, and paying for the wide ring anyway is how a local budget quietly vanishes.
Ask your floor staff where customers say they drove from. That answer is worth more than the map.
You see a radius per store, with the drive time it was drawn from written beside it.
II.
Split Owned From Earned
Cut the envelope in two before anyone picks a channel. One half defends demand you already own. The other half goes hunting for demand you don't.
Owned demand is your name in the search bar and the people already on your list. It converts well and it flatters every report it lands in. It also has a ceiling, and that ceiling arrives sooner than owners expect.
Earned demand costs more per click. It's also the only half that grows the store. The desk writes the split down and defends it. When someone wants to move it, they have to move a number.
You see two budget lines, owned and earned, each with a reason attached.
III.
Stage the Calendar
Fund the weeks that decide the year first. Whatever's left funds the rest. Boxing Week and BFCM are weeks, and a monthly budget flattens them into nothing.
Staging means the creative is approved, the feed is clean and the money is loaded before the window opens. Do that on the Monday of the peak week and you're bidding against everyone who loaded theirs weeks earlier.
Stores run on a second clock. Staffing and stock arrival belong on the media calendar too. Ads that fill a floor nobody can serve are money spent to annoy people.
You see the season laid out in weeks, with the press weeks marked and funded first.
IV.
Set What Gets Read
Name the numbers before anything runs, and name who reads them out loud on Monday. A number nobody owns gets explained away.
Then decide what a bad week looks like. A plan that only defines success has no trigger to change course, so nothing gets fixed until somebody is annoyed enough to phone.
You see the numbers written into the plan, plus the number that triggers a change.
Two Meetings, Two Verdicts
Tuesday for the online numbers. Thursday for the stores. Neither room sees the whole season, and a discount cut to rescue Tuesday quietly empties Thursday's floor.
Postal Code Pride
Postal codes sort mail and city limits mark governance. Neither one knows where your customers park. Drive time does. And the map loses friends the week it drops a neighbourhood somebody at the table lives in.
Stock the Ads Can't See
Local Inventory Ads show what's in the building, and only the feed can tell them. A store-level count that updates late will advertise a sold-out size all weekend. Then the bid gets blamed.
Branded Search Takes the Bow
Branded search closes plenty and starts very little. Let it grade its own homework and you'll cut the campaigns that built the demand it harvested. Split it out and read it weekly.
Can store visits really be measured?
They're modelled by the ad platforms from opted-in location signals and reported at aggregate thresholds. Good enough to plan against, and honest enough to say exactly that.
Do I need separate campaigns for the store and the site?
You need one plan. The mix follows where your margin lives; the desk's job is the split, not the silo.
What about the flyer and the mall banner?
We buy digital. When place-based media genuinely belongs in your season, we'll say so plainly. We just won't pretend to run it.
Our hours and floor space change mid-season. What happens to the plan?
Tell the desk the week it changes. Ads pointed at a closed door still cost money, and Business Profile hours feed the local surfaces directly. A smaller floor usually means a tighter radius and a shorter product list. A bigger one earns reach budget back.
We run five stores. How should the budget split between them?
Not evenly. Even splits feel fair and quietly subsidize your weakest trade area with your strongest store's margin. Start from what each door can absorb, then hold a floor so no store goes dark. The split gets revisited in the Weekly Read.
Count the door.
Thirty minutes, your numbers, and where the store-visit line fits in your plan.
Book a Strategy Call
No pitch deck. Just the plan.