How to Track Commercial ROI of On-Trade Brand Activation Campaigns

Most FMCG and drinks brands are either not measuring the commercial ROI of on-trade brand activation at all, or spending significant time doing it manually — and still not getting an accurate picture. Here’s how Experience This changes that.

Written by Michelle Golding

June 2026

Experience This brand activation analytics and ROI dashboard

The problem with tracking on-trade activation ROI today

Measuring the ROI of on-trade brand activation is one of the most difficult challenges in drinks marketing. Unlike digital advertising where every click and conversion is tracked automatically, on-trade activation happens in the physical world — across hundreds of pubs, bars, restaurants and venues, managed by field sales teams and agencies, with results buried in wholesale depletions data that arrives (if at all) weeks after the campaign has ended.

Here’s how most brands attempt to track on-trade activation ROI today — and why it consistently falls short:

Step 1 — Getting the sales data Brands have to request depletions data from wholesalers or large managed groups — if they have access to it at all. Many don’t. Those that do, receive it weeks after the activation period, making real-time course correction impossible.

Step 2 — Correlating sales to activation Once they have the data, brands have to manually correlate sales uplift to specific on-trade activations — an enormous task given the fragmentation of most activation programmes. Without a centralised record of exactly which venues were activated, who executed them, and what was deployed in each outlet, this correlation is largely guesswork.

Step 3 — Running the Commercial ROI calculation Most brands use offline ROI calculators — spreadsheets or simple tools where they manually input data points to work out an ROI figure. These typically use macro spend figures rather than individual activation costs, because brands don’t have visibility of cost per outlet or per activation. The result is a rough estimate at best.

Step 4 — Comparing activating vs standard outlets The more sophisticated brands will compare performance in activating on-trade venues vs standard venues, and activating time periods vs standard time periods — to get a more accurate read on true uplift. But doing this manually across hundreds of outlets requires significant analytical resource and time.

Step 5 — Presenting and filing the results Results get compiled into a PowerPoint and presented to brand teams. Then they get filed away — and the learnings get lost. The same mistakes get made again: sending kits to on-trade outlets that rejected them last time, activating in venues where it consistently underperforms, missing the outlet types and territories where it works best. Because that data was never centralised, it was never applied to future campaign settings.

For brands without sales data or on-trade tracking infrastructure at all, the alternative is working with specialist research agencies to model uplift — or simply looking at general market uplift and assuming on-trade activation played a role.

How Experience This tracks on-trade activation ROI

Experience This was built to solve exactly this problem — replacing the manual, fragmented, offline process with automated, always-on on-trade ROI measurement that gets more accurate over time.

  • Sales data integration Brands import their depletions data directly into Experience This — either through a simple upload, API integration, or automated review forms where sales data isn’t available. The platform already knows exactly which on-trade outlets were activated, how each activation was executed and what was spent per outlet — so the correlation between sales and activation is done automatically, not manually.

  • Automated comparison periods and outlets Experience This calculates ROI against editable comparison periods and comparison outlets — activating vs standard on-trade venues, activating vs standard time periods — to work out proportionate growth and true ROI. The comparison settings are fully editable so brands can refine their measurement methodology over time.

Three levels of commercial on-trade ROI reporting

Rather than a single blended commercial ROI figure, Experience This gives brands three distinct performance views:

  • Overall ROI table — total campaign performance across all on-trade activations
  • Performance per outlet — which specific on-trade venues delivered the best return
  • Performance per rep, region and territory — where in the field the activation is working hardest

This level of granularity is simply not possible with manual spreadsheet-based measurement.

Holistic feedback capture Alongside sales data, Experience This automatically triggers review forms to agencies, on-trade outlet contacts and sales reps after every activation — capturing qualitative feedback, photos and observations alongside the quantitative data. This gives brands a complete picture of what worked and why across their on-trade estate, not just the numbers.

Centralised learnings applied to future campaigns Critically — the learnings don’t get lost. Customer Marketing can apply on-trade ROI data directly back to campaign settings for next time: targeting the outlet types, territories and customer segments that consistently deliver, avoiding outlets that have rejected activations or underperformed, and replicating the execution guidelines that produced the best results in the on-trade. Execution learns and improves with every campaign cycle.

More effective brand execution and insights with segmentation targeting

What this replaces

  • Manual correlation of sales and activation tracking data ✓
  • Offline ROI calculators and spreadsheet inputs ✓
  • Macro spend estimates replaced with accurate outlet activation costs ✓
  • Manual comparison period and outlet analysis ✓
  • End-of-campaign PowerPoint presentations ✓
  • Learnings lost in offline files ✓
  • Repeated mistakes from lack of centralised on-trade data ✓

See how we replace spreadsheets with automated brand activation →

Manual ROI Calculations

The result

A significant reduction in the time spent calculating on-trade ROI, combined with significantly more accurate and granular data — and crucially, a system that gets smarter with every campaign because learnings are centralised and applied rather than filed away in a PowerPoint.

For brands that previously had no on-trade ROI measurement at all, Experience This provides a structured framework for capturing and analysing activation performance across their entire on-trade estate for the first time.

A note on different approaches to ROI measurement

Some brands complement commercial ROI tracking with consumer response data — measuring metrics like brand awareness, purchase intent and NPS at point of activation. Specialist research agencies provide this type of measurement for large-scale experiential events and are well suited to that purpose.

Experience This focuses specifically on commercial ROI — connecting on-trade activation activity directly to sales uplift data to answer the question that Customer Marketing and Commercial teams are ultimately accountable for: did this activation drive incremental volume and revenue?

Due to the commercially sensitive nature of our clients’ ROI data, we are unable to share specific figures publicly. To see how Experience This measures and improves on-trade activation ROI for your brand, request a demo and we’ll walk you through examples.

See how Experience This compares to other brand execution tools →

Ready to start measuring on-trade activation ROI properly?

Experience This gives FMCG and drinks brands the tools to measure, understand and improve the ROI of every on-trade brand activation — automatically.