Tracking the Consumer Journey. The Newest Cuebiq Location Data Study

The path to attribution is paved with location data. And that is where Cuebiq steps in. Cuebiq tracks offline consumer behavior for marketers so they can better gauge incrementality. Antonio Tomarchio, the company’s Founder and CEO, just announced the latest release of their annual study, conducted by 451 Research, covering primary research survey data from about 150 marketers. 

“The purpose of the study,” he explained, “is to understand how marketers use location data and whether they are extracting real value from this often-underutilized resource. We repeat this survey annually to see how the use cases of location data may have changed from previous years and how they might evolve over time.” 

Charlene Weisler:  What is your definition of location data - what does it encompass?

Antonio Tomarchio: Location data is first- and third-party data collected from mobile device users via a privacy-compliant opt-in process to accepting location data services within a mobile app. It shows foot traffic or visits to brick-and-mortar locations in the real world. From this, marketers can understand meaningful offline trends such as how often consumers visited their brand’s locations, for how long, peak visiting hours, if consumers also visited their competitors, and if their ads changed consumer behavior.

Weisler: How sophisticated would you say marketers are in leveraging location data?

Tomarchio: 98% of marketers cite that they use location data as part of their toolkit. However, the use cases are becoming more complex and sophisticated now, compared to years prior. The way businesses think about location data has evolved towards measurement and analysis. Examples of analytic use cases include measuring the impact of advertising campaigns by overlaying a campaign’s target audience with store visitors, or measuring changes in foot traffic as a campaign unfolds.

Where previously the use cases for location data focused on geo-fencing, couponing and proximity promotions, today’s efforts are moving higher up the value chain to derive deeper insights from customer behavior. Marketers are using the data to solve challenging problems like complex attribution and cross-channel measurement, audience creation and targeting, and analysis of trends of large groups of customers. And instead of trying to reach consumers at the moment when they cross a threshold into an advertiser’s location, modern campaigns focus on reengaging infrequent visitors, finding new customers to win market share, or rewarding loyal ones. 

Weisler: Does location data vary, generally speaking, depending on the supplier? If so, how can a marketer know which source is best for them?

Tomarchio: Location data, whether it is first or third-party, can vary by quality, granularity and scale. When evaluating which source is best for them, marketers must first consider how they will be using the data and what they expect from data partners and whether it is obtained in a privacy-compliant way.  Fifty-three percent of respondents said accuracy of data is a top concern.  Another consideration is how the data will be provided- such as within a dashboard, summary or just raw, aggregated data.  

Weisler: What are the opportunities in using location data?

Tomarchio: Marketers can understand if a campaign generated incremental visits to store, optimize performance in real time in order to increase ROI, as well as tie visits to transactions. They can also build audiences based on competitive brand behavior, target customers based on offline behaviors and use location-based insights to segment and enrich their buyer personas. Additionally, it allows marketers to analyze affinities from offline visits and cross-channel shopping, measure and predict brand loyalty and analyze variations in behavior based on geography. It helps marketers fully map the customer journey.

Weisler: What are the challenges in using location data?

Tomarchio: The main challenges are a result of internal resources and external stakeholders. For example, 41% of marketers in our study cited the lack of budget as a direct challenge to executing their overall marketing priorities and 68% cited the lack of coordination between internal stakeholders as limiting their ability to execute on data.  However, once companies coordinate internally and work to better integrate location data into their everyday flow of business processes, they are able to derive deeper insights from customer behavior and solve challenging problems like complex attribution, audience creation and targeting, and analysis of trends of large groups of customers.

Weisler: What were the study takeaways and surprises?

Tomarchio: Advertisers are most concerned about the quality of their location data and privacy compliance for all looking to adopt new tech/data (97%). Also, its usage is increasingly becoming sophisticated, marking a significant pivot in the way businesses are thinking about it. A big surprise was that a significant chunk of respondents still consider their companies beginners, from 22-32% depending on the use case. 

Weisler: What are the next steps for Cuebiq?

Tomarchio: A big focus for our industry, and therefore Cuebiq, is the concept of incrementality. As networks, publishers and agencies continue to guarantee business outcomes in ad deals, marketers will need to be able to distinguish between consumers exposed to ads who were already planning to visit vs. those who visited because of exposure to an ad – which is the incremental effect, driven by ad sensitivity. Our role is to help marketers segment consumers based on how the campaign impacted their offline behaviors and decrease the cost per incremental visit, by giving them the ability to best optimize their strategies. Additionally, as the industry looks to navigate attribution in a post-cookie world, we believe there will be a rise in the usage of location data as the offline “cookie” and are future-proofing out business to adapt to the ever changing ecosystem in a privacy compliant way. 

Weisler; How can marketers become more knowledgeable in the use of location data?

Tomarchio: Ultimately, marketers need to shift from a narrow view that takes a location data point as an indicator of ‘where’ somebody was at a point in time, to letting location data inform broader questions of why people are going to a particular location, how they get there and what they do once they are in place. In the end, businesses will see performance results once they shift from viewing location data as a tactical resource to viewing it as a key strategic asset.

This article first appeared in www.Mediapost.com