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Retail
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In-store retail media networks have transformed the consumer retail experience since 2023. Retailers have come to understand that their physical spaces are an enormous asset to their operations because they allow in-store promotion of store merchandise (endemic advertising) and even promotion of goods and services not sold in the store (non-endemic advertising).
If retailers are able to precisely measure the numbers of impressions delivered for each ad play, they can understand the value of the in-store screens as well as measure the effectiveness of advertising creative on the basis of point-of-sale data.
Measuring in-store digital signage audiences
As the development of in-store retail media networks continues to grow, advertisers increasingly expect the same level of accountability they receive from digital advertising. Measuring impressions allows retailers to demonstrate the value of every screen and provide advertisers with objective campaign performance metrics.
BlueZoo measures the audience for in-store digital signage by reporting advertising impressions, dwell time, campaign reach, and visitor recurrence frequency. Campaign reach can be reported across digital signage placed in different stores and indicates when the saturation point–when X% of the population has been exposed to the ad more than Y times– has been reached. These measurements provide retailers with consistent analytics across individual displays, entire stores, or multi-store retail media networks.
Beyond impression counts, BlueZoo helps retailers understand how campaigns perform over time and how often shoppers are exposed to advertising, enabling brands to optimize campaign duration, creative rotation, and media investment.
Measuring advertising effectiveness and optimizing advertisement creative
Retail media networks create new revenue opportunities, but they also enable retailers to better understand the relationship between advertising exposure and purchasing behavior.
By comparing advertising impressions with point-of-sale transactions, retailers can evaluate how different creative content influences sales. These insights help brands refine campaigns, improve creative performance, and maximize return on advertising investment. The same insights help retailers maximize the value of their in-store signage and therefore maximize the prices they charge brands for “rental” of these screens.
In particular, now that the cost of synthesizing studio-quality video ad creatives has plummeted due to AI-enabled video synthesis, advertisers can create large numbers of candidate ads at very low cost. The issue then becomes how to identify the highest performing ad from dozens or hundreds of candidates for each screen in each store.
BlueZoo’s audience measurement solves this problem using point-of-sale data to calculate the “revenue per impression” for each candidate ad. The highest-performing ad can then be adopted as the seed for a follow-on round of creative optimization. See our case study with Google on this page.
Shopper journey analysis
In-store shopper journey analysis is valuable to retailers because it can both record the exposure of shoppers to different products, and measure the impact of signage that does not have a dedicated BlueZoo measurement sensor. BlueZoo can provide shopper journey analysis in two ways.
First, BlueZoo can anonymously record shopper journeys using smartphone Wi-Fi MAC addresses which are essentially fixed during a shopping trip in-store. Smartphone Wi-Fi MAC addresses are either “global” and never change month to month or are “local” and rotate more slowly than the length of the shopper journey. See more information about smartphone Wi-Fi MAC addresses.
Second, BlueZoo can record the path of shopping baskets or shopping carts if BLE beacons are attached. Such beacons broadcast a fixed BLE device address periodically (e.g. every 1/5 of a second) and are detected by BlueZoo BLE sensors to provide very fine-grain presence information of the basket or cart. Beacons are battery-powered and can operate continuously for over a year.
“Accurate audience measurement is critical to our business. BlueZoo’s technology has finally allowed us to report verified audience numbers to our advertisers, even for indoor or underground locations.”
Julian Chu
COO, SOS Group
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Solution spotlight
Optimizing in-store retail video advertisements with Google AI
Using audience measurement to continuously improve advertising performance
BlueZoo collaborates with Google to promote combining generative AI with audience measurement to improve the sales performance of in-store video advertising.
Google’s Omni technology allows rapid generation of multiple studio-quality video advertisements to implement a single creative concept. Rather than selecting a single candidate creative based on intuition alone, retailers can deploy multiple creative variations across their store network and test each one using real-world audience and sales data.
BlueZoo provides the measurement layer for this process by reporting advertising impressions and dwell time. When combined with point-of-sale data, retailers can calculate revenue per impression which normalizes sales performance by the number of shoppers who actually had the opportunity to see (OTS) each advertisement, providing a fair comparison between competing creative concepts when audience size varies.
The two capabilities are: super-low-cost of quality video and mechanism to measure performance.
Together, this means that you can account for the environment in which the ads are played, including the demographics of a specific store, the season or weather when the ad will be played. The success of a specific ad candidate will take into account these environmental conditions.
By combining Google’s AI-powered content generation with BlueZoo’s privacy-friendly audience measurement, retailers can optimize their retail media networks, maximize advertising revenue, and deliver more effective in-store advertising experiences for both brands and shoppers.
Solution spotlight
Home improvement retailer
Measuring the effectiveness of in-store retail media
As one of North America’s largest home improvement retailers expanded its network of in-store digital merchandising displays, it needed a reliable way to measure the audiences those displays were reaching. Accurate impression measurement was essential not only for evaluating advertising performance, but also for understanding how digital signage influenced shopper engagement throughout the store.
Traditional store-wide traffic counts were not detailed enough to support the retailer’s advertising goals. Rather than estimating impressions from overall store traffic, the retailer wanted to measure the audience for each individual digital screen and advertising panel, giving brands visibility into how many shoppers were exposed to advertising within specific departments and product categories.
BlueZoo deployed sensors equipped with downward-pointing directional antennas above store aisles, allowing each sensor’s detection zone to be calibrated to the physical environment. This flexible deployment enabled accurate measurement within individual merchandising areas while minimizing measurements from adjacent aisles, adapting to varying store layouts and tall shelving without relying on cameras or consumer mobile applications.
The deployment provided objective measurement throughout the store, enabling the retailer to evaluate campaign performance, optimize display placement, and demonstrate the value of its in-store retail media network to participating brands. By combining flexible deployment options with calibrated detection zones, BlueZoo delivered these insights while respecting customer privacy; providing a practical alternative to camera-based measurement systems for large, complex retail environments. Learn more about how a leading home improvement retailer uses BlueZoo audience measurement.
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