The continued rise of mobile as a primary digital advertising channel has yielded a breadth of new, actionable data which advertisers can use to fine-tune their campaigns. The adage “right person, right place, right time” still rings true as the key to effective marketing strategies, and the rise of mobile advertising makes this even more actionable.
As consumers spend more time on their connected mobile devices, advertisers are able to collect more and more data similar to that collected on desktop—including demographics, behavior, interests and intent. Mobile device connectivity adds another dimension to the equation, and that is accurate location data over time. At MediaMath, we think about location data in three distinct ways: historical location, real-time location and location measurement. Effectively advertising using all three of these buckets can not only reach the right person, at the right place and at the right time, but also drive quantifiable business outcomes.
Historical location
Location-based targeting involves targeting consumers who have visited a specific geographic location in the past, and can include dimensions of frequency and recency. Mobile location data gives advertisers the real-world context of a mobile interaction, and can be used to infer demographics, interests and even intent, all of which have traditionally been components of marketers’ audience segmentation strategies. For example, mobile location data may identify a user at three separate car dealership lots over the course of a month, indicating a very likely auto intender. Beyond these types of audience segmentations, advertisers can target consumers who have visited their brick-and-mortar location, or conquest those consumers who have visited their competitors’ locations.
Real-time location
Hyperlocal targeting is the targeting of consumers in pre-defined geographic areas in real-time, which gives advertisers the ability to target users while they are inside or within a certain proximity of a physical location. A coffee shop could enlist a hyperlocal targeting strategy to reach consumers within a 100-meter radius with a coupon to entice them to come in. Similarly, a retailer aiming to conquest a competitor’s customers could leverage hyperlocal targeting to geo-fence the competitor’s nearby brick-and-mortar locations with a discount or special offer while they’re in the shopping mindset. Beyond these direct response use cases, a brand could take advantage of popular events and gatherings by targeting those users within the venue while the event is happening.
While both hyperlocal and location-based targeting can be used as standalone targeting strategies, combining the two effectively can yield even more finely tuned, and thus less wasteful, campaigns. The aforementioned coffee shop could boost performance on their “within radius” hyperlocal targeting strategy by layering on a location-based segment of coffee-shop frequenters to ensure their offers are served to likely coffee drinkers. A sporting goods retailer could tailor their creatives in a hyperlocal conquesting campaign to the inferred interests of a consumer, such as serving a special offer on golf clubs to a “golf enthusiast” who was seen at three golf courses over the past six weeks.
Location measurement
In a perfect world, advertisers would be able to trace the entire path-to-purchase of their customers across all touch points. Unfortunately, we don’t live in a perfect world (yet), so advertisers rely on a combination of measurement techniques to determine the effectiveness of a campaign. The rise of e-commerce gave advertisers the ability to attribute online purchases to online ad-exposures, and cross-device mapping continues to improve the efficacy of this. More recently, mapping offline CRM data to online users has enabled advertisers to attribute offline revenue to online ad impressions. But what if a consumer shops offline and isn’t a member of a loyalty program or pays with cash? Mobile location data provides a useful proxy for those tough-to-trace offline shoppers.
The influx of mobile location data enables vendors to track those ad-exposed users as they go about their daily lives, which lets advertisers determine whether or not their campaigns effectively drove consumers to specific physical locations, such as an owned brick-and-mortar store. Location measurement vendors also have the ability to compare the movements of ad-exposed users to non-exposed ones, giving the advertiser an even finer level of detail by accounting for variability. Though a retailer may not be able to attribute an exact purchase amount back to an ad-exposed user, foot traffic attributed to a campaign at the user-level can serve as a useful proxy for ad effectiveness. As technologies are refined and location data further activated, this marriage between online and offline will become stronger for retail advertisers.