In this age of digital media, technology and data are changing rapidly as data signal continues to explode. Each new data brings the possibility of new measurement solutions and new methodological approaches that allow us to better understand the consumer path to purchase and overall campaign effectiveness.
If you think about it, measuring clicks and click-through rates (CTR) in digital channels has long been an industry standard of evaluating campaign effectiveness and used in modeling campaign attribution. However, research shows that clicks on online display ads are often not correlated with brand awareness or purchase intent, and using clicks in mobile as brand interest can be even more of an issue. Since clicks are not good indicators of consumer brand awareness or purchase intent, we can look to the growth in marketing data to help us find alternatives.
Mobility data (data from tablets, smartphones, IoT, wearables) is a perfect example of new data that improves our ability to measure advertising. As the consumption of digital media continues to move to devices which can provide mobility data, the arsenal of physical signal of user behaviors explodes. One of the pieces of mobility data which has proven to be most valuable to marketers is location data. Cross-channel location data is essential for enhancing our ability to measure the effectiveness of advertising by actually allowing us to measure the effect of online to offline on a broad scale and not just for those users who we have been able to track through qualitative surveys and diaries.
Passive location data, specifically lat/long, is a by-product of opt-in user brand app usage, check-ins, photo tagging, social posts and more. Location data can be used to move beyond geo-fencing and targeting users based on geography to providing a signal for mobile based audience models and in-store measurement. The key to location-based metrics is to tie location to other attributes: brick and mortar brands, events, behavioral propensities or any other audience signal that can be associated to a geographical area.
The magic of location data is the power of its signal when it is accurate and associated with other relevant metadata. Once location is in context, we can connect digital campaign information to the corresponding audience interaction in the physical world to achieve that dream of measuring the effect of online brand interactions to offline sales as we know online channels have increasing influence on offline sales (see the chart below).
Location data also enables us to better understand attribution and campaign performance across channels (desktop, tablet, smartphone, TV, OOH, etc.).
By identifying location data and subsequently analyzing the physical patterns of the audiences targeted on various channels, you can go beyond click-through to measure what matters – the impact your cross-channel campaign has on in-store traffic and purchases. And now for the best part, I’m extremely excited for the release of an important project many companies, colleagues, and myself have been working on in collaboration with the IAB. Today we are releasing a primer on how location data is used to better understand ROI and attribution. This piece highlights current and emerging practices for using mobile location data in numerous ways to better understand campaign and marketing performance. You can download the primer, “Marketing ROI and Location Data” here.