If you run marketing or media for a large retail chain, you’re probably drowning in dashboards.
Every channel has a favorite KPI. Every partner claims they “drove more traffic.” At review time, you get a collage of impressions, clicks, visits and footfall charts.
Useful? Sometimes.
Strategic? Not really.
For promo-led retailers, the real question is:
“Did our promotions attract the right shoppers, keep them engaged with the right offers, and convert that attention into sales?”
That’s a different bar than “we got more people through the door.”
The limits of footfall for promo-led retail
Footfall and visits are not useless. They can tell you:
- Whether something broadly changed in store activity
- Which regions reacted more to a campaign
- Directional lift vs typical patterns
But for digitally savvy retailers, traffic has three big limitations:
- It’s often muddled and noisy
Built on location data and sampling, impacted by privacy changes and device behaviour. - It’s detached from the promo calendar
A visit count rarely tells you which weekly ad, category or vendor-funded program made a difference. - It doesn’t explain sales or margin impact
A busy store can still be a low-margin store if the wrong things are moving.
If your recap deck leads with traffic, you’re making it harder than it needs to be to answer what executives and brand partners actually care about.
Start from the promo, not the platform
Retail doesn’t run on channels. It runs on promotions:
- Weekly ads and flyers
- Seasonal catalogs and events
- Vendor-funded features and category pushes
Those promos should be the spine of your marketing and measurement, especially when you already have:
- A digital circular / weekly experience
- An app and ecommerce
- Programmatic, social and retail media in the mix
The better question to ask your teams and partners is:
“How did this promo plan perform across attract, engage and convert?”
Attract → Engage → Convert: a more honest lens
Instead of optimizing for “more traffic,” digitally savvy retailers are starting to organize around three stages:
- Attract – Are we reaching the right shoppers with promo-led creative at the right time?
- Engage – Are they actually interacting with our digital circulars, offers and content?
- Convert – Are we seeing lift in promo items, categories and baskets, in-store and online?
Every program and partner should be able to show their impact at each stage, not just at the very top.
Client Story
A 90-store regional retailer shifted its quarterly review from “channel by channel” to “Attract → Engage → Convert” for one key metro:
- Attract: Refocused paid media on promo-led creatives tied to the weekly flyer
- Engage: Directed traffic into a revamped digital circular instead of generic landing pages
- Convert: Measured promo item and category lift vs control stores
In 8 weeks, the same media budget produced:
- +39% promo-led reach
- +61% digital circular views
- +7% promo item sales lift vs control
The traffic charts were still there. They just weren’t the headline.
Where to go from here
You don’t need to throw out every KPI. You just need a different starting point.
- Begin with the promo plan for the week or season.
- Frame your recap around Attract → Engage → Convert, not channel silos.
- Ask every partner to show how they impact each stage, not just traffic.
If this sounds uncomfortably familiar, it’s a sign your metrics are serving channels, not promotions. Sit down with a Red Pepper SME and rebuild your scorecard around the promos that actually run your business.
