TikTok Announces New Data Partnership with Foursquare to Provide Insights into In-Store Visits

Connecting the performance of your digital ads to physical, in-store visits has always been a key challenge, with various solutions like beacons, check-ins and proximity tracking all offering some level of insight, but also their own implementation difficulties.

TikTok’s trying out a new option on this front, via a partnership with Foursquare, which will enable TikTok advertisers in the US and Canada to utilize Foursquare Attribution to better quantify the effectiveness of their campaigns in driving people into stores.

Foursquare Attribution is able to connect user activity to a physical location by tracking mobile devices as they move through an area. The system then matches exposed devices with this data, and provides direct feedback on how many people who’ve seen your ad have subsequently visited your store location.

As per TikTok:

“With Foursquare, this integration will focus on the metrics that are critical to advertisers with physical business locations. Advertisers will be able to understand how effective their media plan on TikTok has been and discover new insights to optimize campaigns, ultimately tying their TikTok investment back to real-world visits at their business locations.”

Though there are some limitations with that.

The biggest factor that comes to mind is Apple’s ATT update, which could limit the capacity of Foursquare’s system to be able to track and report on physical visitors based on whether people have opted out of tracking.

But then again, opting out of Foursquare tracking would essentially render the less useful, and with around 55 million active users of its own app, and its location technology powering elements of other platforms including Uber, Twitter, Snapchat, and more, it has a huge database of location insights to tap into, which could make it a good option for gleaning more insight into the effectiveness of your ads, and how they’re generating in-store visits.

Essentially, Foursquare’s data capacity is much broader than its own tools, which could ensure that it’s able to provide accurate, valuable location insights, even with the potential limitations of people switching off data tracking in some apps.

And it could be a great compliment to your TikTok ads, providing more direct attribution between your online campaigns and offline performance.

You can read a case study of how McDonald’s utilized TikTok’s Foursquare attribution here.