Location data’s prominence in the advertising and marketing world continues today with a new announcement from YP. The company released information on Audience Cartography, its process for communicating location insights or “stories” to multi-location brands seeking to better understand and target local audiences.
YP positions Audience Cartography as a means to understanding location data and local audiences, putting an emphasis on the “stories” within the data. Specifically, in an accompanying e-book, the company says that beyond the data “is a story waiting to be told” which can help drive improved conversions and ROI.
The Audience Cartography process leverages YP’s proprietary search intent data with mobile location data and layers five critical data sets to tell a comprehensive, location-specific audience story. These data layers include:
- Store visit location
- Day time location of visitors
- Night time location of visitors
- Lifestyle locations
- Interaction with campaign location
According to the release, the insights pulled from these layers are communicated to advertisers in the following ways:
Interactive click maps that allow businesses to zoom in on specific areas close to a store location to show where and how people are interacting with a campaign, making it possible to more effectively optimize performance in real-time.
Customer store location heat maps and demographic insights (above) that visualize the location and characteristics of any given audience as a means of expanding targeting opportunities and increasing overall campaign relevancy.
Store visit reports that calculate total visits to individual stores, helping to more clearly identify campaign effectiveness and account for online-to-offline attribution.
Halo reports that help businesses understand the residual effects of their digital marketing campaigns.
The e-book goes on to reinforce the ad industry’s need to replace click and impression counting with a more comprehensive data approach that identifies the intersection between consumer, campaign and location. This new initiative is YP’s take on how to derive such audience insights and understanding from the troves of available location data.
As of late, xAd and Placed have put an emphasis on content to help drive awareness of similar location data tools by sharing insight into foot traffic at major restaurants and even insights derived from location data of Pokémon Go users. It will be interesting to see how YP leverages content to educate the market around its new tool.
