Connecting Ad Spend to In-Store ROI for Franchise Retail
Vail Creatives built Relax The Back a custom attribution system that connects digital ad spend to in-store revenue across their entire franchise network, without having to pay another company to have access to their own data.
Impact Overview
$60+ retail locations unified into one owned reporting environment and ready to scale
Executive visibility into exactly which order connected to a touchpoint and breakdown of attribution across all paid channels
$90,000+ in three-year platform costs saved versus a comparable enterprise tool
Built from scratch and delivered in 10 weeks for independent operation without added technical resources.
In the first 30 days with 4 pilot stores:
$300K+ of in-store revenue connected to digital advertising for the first time
~49%+ of orders now traceable to a digital touchpoint
Background
Relax The Back (RTB) sells the way most retail franchises do. Customers find products online through search ads, social campaigns, and marketing emails. For high-ticket furniture products, customers often want to see products in store to learn more about the features, compare design finishes, and check for personal fit and comfort. Customers then make the purchase in a physical store, where the sale is rung up through their point-of-sale system. The in-store experience is therefore an indispensable part of the sales process, yet disconnected from their digital marketing efforts.
This is the classic "Research Online, Buy Offline" (ROBO) problem, and it left the two halves of the business difficult to reconcile. Ad platforms reported clicks and impressions. The POS system recorded transactions. Nothing tied them together.
Every advertising dollar went into a black hole. Across all locations, RTB could assume their campaigns drove foot traffic, but they could not prove it or measure it. Decisions about ad spend, brand strategy, and resource allocation did not have the full scope of numbers to back them up, because those numbers did not exist in any connected form.
Challenge
Siloed systems. The POS system held retail sales in a custom build with no APIs. Google Ads, Meta, and Klaviyo held the campaigns. Shopify held digital sales. No bridge existed between them.
No offline attribution. A digital ad click could not be tied to an in-store purchase, so return on ad spend for physical sales was unknowable.
Multi-location complexity. Reporting had to work at the network level for corporate and at the store level for franchise owners, without exposing the whole network's data to every operator
The enterprise trap. Off-the-shelf platforms could close the gap at a steep cost: $30,000 to $110,000 a year (plus onboarding). Many often charge per seat/store (such as HubSpot) and other platforms like Rockerbox often aren’t able to easily partition an individual store’s performance within the dashboard.
Vail Creatives Intervention (10 Weeks)
We built RTB a custom attribution system we call Footprint, that connects digital advertising to in-store sales. It lives entirely inside the client’s own Google Cloud environment.
Here is what we built:
A unified data warehouse in BigQuery that pulls in POS transactions from the client’s POS system and campaign activity from all paid acquisition channels including Google Ads, Meta, Klaviyo, and print.
Four attribution models running in parallel, connecting in-store sales to digital activity through geographic, store-visit, email, and social signals.
A two-tier, partitioned dashboard. Corporate sees the full network. Franchise owners get their own dashboard with row-level security, so each one sees only their store.
Automated offline conversion imports that feed sales data back to Google Ads, with all customer data hashed for privacy compliance, so the ad platforms optimize against real in-store revenue instead of clicks.
A conservative, transparent methodology. Every attributed sale is confidence-weighted. The system discounts uncertain matches instead of inflating them, and it shows unattributed sales openly instead of manufacturing attribution.
Adding additional stores takes no code or engineering resources and can be done by anyone on the Relax The Back team.
Team Enablement
As counterintuitive as it may sound, at Vail Creatives, if our clients can't help themselves, we have failed. We built Footprint as a new service offering for retailers like Relax The Back to own and operate without us.
It all lives in RTB's environment. Every piece of data, code, and infrastructure sits in RTB's owned environment, becoming a growth orientated
capital expenditure (CapEx) rather than an annual recurring operating expense (OpEx).We documented the whole thing. RTB's team received a complete operating manual, written for non-technical operators. It covers uploading sales data, adding stores and campaigns, managing access, granting franchise owners secure dashboards, and troubleshooting the pipeline.
No lock-in. RTB is fully autonomous. No recurring license, no subscription, no contract holding their data or workflows hostage. We provide elective post-launch support to ensure a smooth transition.
Lasting Results
Footprint was built as a foundation that can evolve to take on new channels and more advanced modeling over time.
For the first time, Relax The Back can see how their advertising connects to what happens at the register. During an initial 30 day validation period with only 4 pilot stores, in-store sales were measured against digital activity for the first time:
$300K+ of in-store revenue connected to digital advertising for the first time
~49%+ of orders now traceable to a digital touchpoint
Executive visibility into exactly which order connected to a touchpoint and breakdown of attribution across all paid channels
These figures come from the system's standard settings: a 30-day attribution lookback window, with 85% minimum confidence in attribution.
Following the successful pilot, RTB has continued to add dozens of their franchise locations as part of an org-wide rollout.
Client Testimonial
“Nothing on the market fit our franchise model. Vail didn’t just build a system, they embedded with our team, caught gaps we would have missed, and delivered something we fully own in weeks. It was a no-brainer, and they’re the kind of partner you want to keep building with.”
Footprint is how Vail Creatives builds custom data infrastructure for multi-location retail. Built on your systems, owned by your business, handed off to your team. If your advertising is driving in-store sales you can't prove yet, let's talk. Learn more about Footprint here: https://www.vailcreatives.com/footprint
