Using Location Analytics To Help Target Mobile Ads = More Money

Mobile technology has provided the opportunity to engage customers like never before. Serving the right information, at the right time, in the right place is now possible. I say possible, because having the opportunity and actually understanding how to leverage the opportunity are two separate things.

If you’re dealing with one user, then sure it would be easy. But 50k, 100k, 1 million or more users? Serving each user the right information, at the right time, in the right place – becomes very complicated. 

Big ad agencies are dealing with this new reality right now. For them, it used to be so easy - run national ad campaigns on TV, print or radio, target by the specific content served (sports show, soap opera) and there you go.

Now it’s so much more complicated. Everyone is in the same boat – advertisers, developers and publishers all have this transformational opportunity to engage with customers, but truly doing so in an effective manner is truly a transformational challenge.

One of the tools to use to facilitate location specific marketing is location analytics. The data developers can now have at their fingertips is staggering, offering real time information that can provide a big picture, holistic view or can be drilled down to the user level.

However location analytics are only valuable if you know how to interpret the data and use it to provide each user the right information, at the right time, in the right place.

To help provide clarity on the complicated world of location analytics, Phunware has published “A New Discipline at the Intersection of the Digital & Physical Worlds.” The publication provides a real world conversation on the concept of location analytics, providing a comprehensive how-to approach to the subject as it dissects industry best practices.

For example there is a conversation on how to craft a big picture approach to location analytics. As the publication points out, one way to approach location insights is a matter of looking at the data through two different lenses: the customer vs. the location. Is the objective to gain insight into customer behavior? This can inform broad new segmentation profiles based on location behavior and can help determine marketing or service approaches that are customized to the needs of an existing specific customer or customer profile.

A second very valuable dimension in dissecting location data is to understand when location insights produce value. Since data is available in real-time, is the intent to develop insights that are temporary and produce immediate opportunities for modifying marketing or services approaches? Or is the intent to develop long-term insights supported by a large amount of data, leading to more structural changes.

All in all, it’s an eye opening read into the potential that location analytics offers. You can learn more by going to Phunware's blog post which provides more information about the rationale for creating the publication and links to the free document. And if you’d like to ask Vincent Montero a specific question, feel free to shoot him an email.