Foursquare Brings In-Store Measurement to Amazon

This month, Amazon announced a partnership with Foursquare to power a new paid feature in their Amazon Marketing Cloud platform – Foursquare Store Visit Insights. While Foursquare has partnered with other DSPs to provide in-store visit data and modeled in-store attribution for some time, this partnership with Amazon unlocks a new opportunity to break down the barriers of instore measurement while still capitalizing on the benefits of Amazon audiences.

Platform & Capabilities

Advertisers currently buying on Amazon’s DSP with an activated Amazon Marketing Cloud instance, can purchase the new paid feature as a monthly subscription within the native UI. Once subscribed, Foursquare’s visit data flows through AMC for pseudonymized exposure matching and becomes available for querying. Coupled with native advertising signals in AMC, Foursquare Store Visits unlocks several use cases for endemic and non-endemic advertisers not previously available within the Amazon ecosystem.

Potential Use Cases

• In-store Visit Measurement: An energy drink brand wants to measure the in-store traffic being driven to C-Stores in a mobile display campaign targeting twitch viewers within a geo-radius of an eSports event.

• Audience Insights: An insurance company wants to understand the demographic patterns between CTV exposed audiences that result in online-only engagements vs. those who visit physical offices.

• Cross-Channel Journey: A cereal manufacturer wants to create an omnichannel strategy that optimizes the conversion rate based on the number of engagement points, including in-store visits, in a user’s path to purchase.

Our Take

Foursquare is considered a pioneer in the geolocation space so it comes as no surprise that Amazon has chosen them as a partner for AMC, allowing advertisers to capitalize on Foursquare’s 9B+ visits measured across 500M global devices every month. This is a big step for Amazon who historically hasn’t been in a hurry to break down the native barriers that exist within their walled garden ecosystem, especially as it pertains to omnichannel strategy.

This is likely the tip of the iceberg for official data partner integrations into AMC and given the gold rush-esque race to measure incrementality in retail media it’s not astonishing that Amazon is looking to monetize access as a paid feature (beta) within the platform.