Mobile marketing platform UberMedia has coined a new term: “Location ROI” or “LROI.” In that context, the company is measuring and optimizing mobile media against offline store visits.
Michael Hayes, UberMedia’s Chief Revenue Officer, uses the term “Location Visit Optimization” to describe the process of using location data to increase the effectiveness of mobile campaigns to drive incremental store visits. Beyond this, however, Hayes believes a broad new KPI is emerging around offline visits: LROI.
In the same way that call tracking has been used as a primary tool to show the “offline” impact of search or display advertising, location visits is a new metric that will offer brands and marketers that primarily sell offline a much better sense of the true ROI of their media spending.
UberMedia’s optimization capabilities currently only work for mobile marketing, but Hayes says that the company can measure which digital media, whether on desktop or mobile, are driving the most location visits. Hayes adds that location can also be used to verify whether brands without owned retail distribution are reaching intended audiences — are the targeted audiences visiting the stores where the advertiser’s products are sold?
Eventually, LROI could extend beyond digital to all media broadly. Indeed, the ability to measure the impact of TV ads on offline location visits is already available from NinthDecimal and PlaceIQ. This is done by matching households or set-top boxes to device IDs that reside in the same place as the TV, and then seeing those devices later in particular real-world locations.
UberMedia builds custom audiences for advertisers using location history, as well as social/interest graph data from its consumer apps and YouTube. Location data comes from its own first-party apps (e.g., TweetDeck) and from ad calls, which is where most mobile platforms and data providers get location. UberMedia then taps the same location sources to track offline mobile users in the aggregate for location-attribution purposes.
As mentioned, a growing number of companies are connecting online and offline visits and/or using location history for audience segmentation and targeting. They include Google, Facebook, Foursquare, Factual, xAd, NinthDecimal, Verve, ThinkNear, YP and Placed.
UberMedia’s Hayes believes that location will play an increasingly important role in media planning and marketing over time. And at the center of it all will be the new “LROI.”
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