Advertising attribution is a subsector within the broader location-based marketing field that’s gained steam over the past decade. As our digital touchpoints fragment into several devices, the need to track advertiser influence across all of them amplifies. Throw in offline conversions and it’s a hairy challenge.
We’re obviously dealing with a different set of variables at the moment, but attribution hasn’t gone away. In fact, it’s accelerated in some areas and adapted in others. As Foursquare CEO and longtime attribution maven David Shim said in a webcast I moderated today, the transaction path has changed.
Local Shopping Decisions
With that environmental backdrop, the latest news from the attribution universe comes from Tapad and Reveal Mobile. The companies have announced a collaboration that fuses Tapad’s cross-device, pixel-based foot-tracking attribution tech with Reveal Mobile’s VISIT local analytics software.
Breaking that down, Tapad’s specialty is a cross-device matching technology that can pinpoint device movement such as store visits; and parse between several devices in a given household. Meanwhile, Reveal’s VISIT powers location-based campaigns and helps marketers reach in-market shoppers.
The way this comes together specifically is that Tapad’s technology is infused into VISIT Local. This gives marketers who use VISIT Local added capability to segment audiences and perform targeted messaging to reach the right people (devices) that have influence over local shopping decisions.
“VISIT Local has always given our customers access to high-intent location-based audiences. With the addition of cross-device matching from Tapad, advertisers can boost audience sizes up to 300 percent while maintaining full confidence in quality and relevance,” Reveal Mobile CEO Brian Handly said in a release. “VISIT Local users can now apply multiple criteria and attributes to a single location-based audience, giving them the advanced control and transparency they need.”
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Soccer Moms and Concert Goers
Back to the art of attribution, Tapad’s engine will not just enable ad targeting but also tracking. Its pixel-based (privacy friendly) foot-traffic attribution technology will bring offline conversion tracking to VISIT Local. In other words, the latter now gains the ability to measure campaign impact on in-store visits.
“With cross-device matching and pixel-based foot traffic attribution, marketers using VISIT Local can better address the consumer’s preferences and habits Tapad COO Mark Connon said in the same prepared statement, “and deliver them consistently actionable information on user behavior.”
Separate from (but timed in conjunction with) this announcement, Reveal Mobile has also brought temporal relevance into the mix. Its custom audience profiles can now reveal (excuse the pun) people who have visited locations on different dates, allowing marketers to target with greater dimension.
For example, marketers can target affinity groups with the statistical principle of “past behavior is an indicator of future outcomes.” A core tenet of audience targeting, this amplifies Reveal Mobile’s ability to target consumers who exhibit the past behavior of profiles like concert-goer, soccer mom, and so on.
We’ll continue watching as these platforms integrate and as the world of location-based martech continues to evolve. Meanwhile, see our previous Reveal Mobile coverage here.
