Measure the thing the business actually sells. For a mall, that’s a person walking in.

01 — Where it started

Hudson Lights sits in Fort Lee with the kind of location retailers dream about. Foot traffic still wasn’t where it needed to be. Shoppers had moved online, and the old mall playbook of directory listings, print and generic digital ads couldn’t answer the one question ownership needed answered: did any of this bring people in?

02 — What was really going on

Clicks don’t pay a mall’s rent. Visits do. So measurement had to change before the media did. If a platform couldn’t report people walking in, it was the wrong platform.

03 — What I did

1. 01

   Fenced the right places. Location-based mobile ads reaching people near the mall and in competing shopping areas.

2. 02

   Targeted behavior, not age brackets. Audience segments built on shopping behavior, retail interests and buying patterns.

3. 03

   Matched the message to the moment. Creative tailored to specific retail interests and seasonal shopping.

4. 04

   Reported by the door. Every campaign measured in observed store visits, broken out by address.

04 — The call that mattered

Choosing a platform that reports store visits instead of clicks. It changed the conversation with ownership from impressions to visits to the property.

05 — What changed

• Campaign A (Sep 29 to Oct 14, 2023): 257 observed visits on $500.58, about $1.95 each.
• Campaign B, running alongside it (Sep 20 to Oct 15, 2023): 315 observed visits on $750.48, about $2.38 each.
• 572 observed visits across both, about $2.19 per visit. Some devices may be counted in both campaigns.
• The results supported expanding mobile investment and set up visit-based measurement going forward.

Observed visits are device-level matches reported by the ad platform, not a head count of customers.

06 — What I'd tell you