Top Trends in Location-Based Advertising for 2020

Reveal Mobile recently produced a webinar featuring four location data industry experts who shared key trends, insights and predictions for location-based marketing and advertising in 2020. 

The discussion covered location privacy, location data quality, use cases, consumer attitudes toward location sharing and more. The panel of location data experts included:

• Yory Wurmser, Principal Analyst for Location Intelligence and Mobile, eMarketer
• Asif Khan, Founder & President, Location Based Marketing Association
• Trevor Hamilton, Vice President Measurement and Targeting, Kochava
• Andy Schrader, Chief Product Officer, Reveal Mobile

The webinar was attended by hundreds of digital marketers and advertising leaders at full-service agencies and consumer brands. For those who couldn’t make the event, we are providing a few of the insights shared during the conversation. You can listen to the full 60-minute conversation for free.

Location Privacy

Andy: With CCPA and the iOS and Android changes, everybody is becoming more aware of how location data is used. As a result, there will be more established norms and ground rules that everyone will accept. This will help improve the experience for consumers and for advertisers. 

Asif: With location data usage, we’re moving away from personalization and more toward the creation of audiences, segments and cohorts.

Consumer Attitudes Toward Sharing Their Location

Yory: Consumers are largely ambivalent, with a small minority being cautious, about sharing their location. A majority of consumers are willing to share their location as long as they get something of value in return. There is more initial hesitancy about sharing, but in the long-term people will continue to see value in sharing their location data. In effect, the downturn in consumer location data sharing will be slight and temporary. 

Asif: Less than 20 percent of consumers were sharing location data 10 years ago. That figure is now at 90 percent. There’s less of an outcry among consumers than there is from legislators. Data vaulting is becoming more of a trend as well, with consumers being given the opportunity to share their data and receive compensation for it in micro-transactions. 

Trevor: An interesting barometer for sensitivity around location sharing is GDPR. When GDPR went into effect, users of the web consented to more than 90 percent of cookie requests. This underscores consumers’ ambivalence toward sharing their data because they are benefitting from the services that their location enables. 

New and Emerging Use Cases

Yory: Online to offline attribution for retailers is a growing use case for location data. More specifically, combining location data data with other data sources — basket size, dwell time, etc. — is helping retailers better understand how a store is performing. This type of data analysis is also helping advertisers improve their ROI because they are tying in-store purchases to ads served and seen. 

Location Data Quality

Andy: Just as important as audience data is place data. The locations that you need to map device data is critical to marketing effectiveness. Be sure to dig in to the POI database that your solution provider makes available. If the locations you care about aren’t included, then all the device data in the world isn’t particularly helpful.

Yory: Transparency in location data collection is key. Be sure you know where the data is coming from, knowing that location data from mobile app SDKs is a hallmark of quality.

We invite you to listen to and share the full webinar.