How do you prove paid media drove footfall in a wet Easter?

The brief

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Merry Hill is a shopping centre in the West Midlands. Its brief for Easter 2026 was to drive footfall and brand awareness for the centre's Easter event, reaching four distinct audience segments across a wide catchment. The segments were Steady Affluents 55+, Steady Affluents Families, Hectic Families and Funtime Friends. The season itself was working against the centre, with wetter weather and higher petrol prices than any of the three years the campaign would later be measured against.

What we planned

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We matched each audience to the channel that fitted it. ITVX carried premium video on demand for the older, more affluent audience. TikTok reached the youngest segment, Funtime Friends. Meta and programmatic display extended reach across the wider catchment, and Google Ads captured intent from people searching. Targeting focused on 40 defined catchment areas across the West Midlands, which went on to generate 50.5% of all site traffic during the campaign, giving clear evidence that the plan reached the places it was designed to reach.

Above all, we designed the campaign to measure the Easter period like-for-like against the previous three years, using trading-hours weather as a control variable to separate the impact of paid media on footfall from seasonal effects.

How it ran

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Five channels ran from 11 March to 30 April 2026. TikTok, which was chosen as the incremental-reach channel for the youngest audience, delivered well ahead of plan.

What the reporting showed

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Footfall across the Easter window rose against all three comparators, "against the wettest weather and the highest petrol prices of any of the three comparator years". Nine of the 17 days in the window had rain in trading hours, yet the footfall lift held. Growth also built rather than faded, with the campaign's peak week landing in the back half of the flight rather than the front. Underpinning all of this was a weather-controlled footfall analysis that we built from the centre's own footfall counters and Open-Meteo weather data, giving Merry Hill a clearer read on what paid media achieved than a simple year-on-year footfall count could offer.

Campaign results

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Campaign results, Easter 2026

Measure	Result
Easter-window footfall v 2025 like-for-like	Up 5.2%
v 2019 pre-administration baseline	Up 7.4%
Launch week to peak week	Up 40.8%

Source: Route post-campaign analysis, Easter 2026; footfall from Merry Hill's in-bound counters, like-for-like Easter windows 2025 and 2019; weather from Open-Meteo, Dudley, trading hours.