• by Tyler Loechner , Staff Writer @mp_tyler, April 13, 2015

Tapad, a cross-screen marketing technology provider, is the latest to offer marketers a way to measure the impact digital advertising has on in-store sales -- a trend that was thrust into the spotlight late last year when Oracle shelled out an estimated "high hundreds of millions" to acquire Datalogix.

Tapad's news isn't as groundbreaking as Oracle's -- hundreds of millions of dollars are not trading hands -- but it continues the trend nonetheless. The company on Monday announced a partnership with Placed, a location-based ad-targeting firm and in-store attribution company.

Tapad says it can now optimize campaigns based on store-visit data from Placed. The company claims that in testing, one cross-screen campaign led to a 74% rise in restaurant visits, while a CPG brand saw a 24% boost in store visits.

“Recently we ran a campaign utilizing [Tapad’s] partnership with Placed, which helped us understand how cross-screen exposure increases campaign engagement and drives store visitations,” stated Leon Barsoumian, SVP of analytics research and technology at Havas Media.

Placed has a panel of more than 500,000 opted-in users, the company claims, representing 1 in 500 adults in the U.S. Tapad sends anonymous campaign data to Placed, which then measures store visitation for those exposed to advertising, the companies explain in a release. The release adds: “Additionally Placed compares a control group of people who have not been exposed to digital campaigns to the consumers who visited a store after seeing one or more advertisements on any combination of internet-connected devices.”

These types of partnerships have been happening with increasing frequency of late. Earlier this month, for example, OwnerIQ struck a similar deal with Retail Solutions Inc. (RSi).

Rocket Fuel, a programmatic ad platform, also recently began working with Placed for in-store attribution and released claimed it has seen a 41.3% lift in store visits as a result of optimizing campaigns with Placed's data.

However, Tapad claims its offering differs from others because it supports cross-screen campaigns, whereas other companies in the programmatic space that have begun measuring the impact on in-store sales are typically focused on mobile.