Business and Marketing

A mobile ad platform releases what it claims is the first true benchmarking of the channel's impact on in-store sales.

Holiday 2014 demonstrated mobile's increasingly crucial role in retail marketing, accounting for more than half of retail searches. But marketers continue to fly blind with direct offers made to shoppers, especially in the CPG arena, where customer data from retailers can be difficult or even impossible to come by. Now out comes the ad platform 4Info with a benchmarking report it claims pries open the lid on mobile's effect at retail.

It found that mobile campaigns drive more than double the sales that desktop campaigns do. Mobile executions produced about $30 in sales per 1,000 impressions versus only $13 for desktop, with average return on ad spend for mobile hitting 257%. The study focused on 83 mobile campaigns in seven CPG categories over their entire durations, with the average being 11 weeks.

The benchmarking was performed using Nielsen Catalina Solutions, which integrates Catalina frequent shopper data with Nielsen homescan to derive results representative of national activity. “This is the first time such benchmarks have been available to mobile advertisers,” says 4Info CEO Tim Jenkins. “This is causal data that represents exactly what's happening in-store.”

Jenkins says the study addresses the two most pressing needs of mobile advertisers—how to scale addressable audiences across mobile screens and how to calculate resulting offline sales.

Business Breaking News: 8 Reasons to Consider Franchising

Paving the way for a new business isn't easy. But what if you could have all the benefits of being an entrepreneur with the resources of a bigger company? Opening a franchise might just be the right path for you.

Franchising allows bigger businesses to branch out and grow, while giving people the opportunity to run their own business with the help and support of a larger company that has a proven formula for success. Of course, that doesn't mean that opening a franchise is a piece of cake, either, but for many aspiring business owners, franchising is a much less risky, yet still rewarding, option.

These eight franchisors and franchisees told Business News Daily why franchising is a great choice.

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