One of the things I see over and over is the lack of education in mobile advertising with mobile marketers collecting mobile data and not being able to interpret it correctly.
Today, I’m going to clear up one of the truths in mobile advertising, specifically towards mobile ad networks which seems to have mobile marketers pulling out their hair.
The operating assumption is that all mobile networks can equally geotarget and give marketers the kind of local precision that matches the phone’s GPS capabilities. In other words, because the phone can tell what’s nearby and pinpoint user location, advertisers assume they can equally access that level of targeting for their mobile ad campaigns.
No. No sir, you are incorrect.
In the mobile advertising space only five to 10 percent of all mobile ad inventory has true GPS-generated latitude- longitude data. Many ad impressions in fact are powered with less precise geographic information: zip codes, metro area, carrier IPs, etc. Also, even ad inventory with latitude-longitude information isn’t always what it seems. That’s because some ad platforms will take the rougher location data like a zip code and translate it into a latitude-longitude format.
For example, ad suppliers can generate a “centroid” — the GPS centerpoint of a zip code, metro area, or user cluster — and use that coordinate to geo-tag their available inventory, or they can randomize to distribute users across the same area. Now, that’s fucked up right?
In practice “geotargeting” on mobile display networks can be highly variable. It typically means DMA or city level targeting. Most of what mobile marketers get access to is no better than IP targeting, which can be very imprecise. Some networks or publishers may claim to be able to deliver lat-long precision but they’re usually misrepresenting what’s available, in the same way that online ad networks misrepresented that they could target by ZIP for years, when they were really just doing IP sniffing.
Mobile publishers have access to the location information they ask of their users. This location data could be as general as a city, or as specific as a request to capture their exact location at any given time. The more exact the location, the more valuable it is both to an ad network and to a mobile advertiser. Latitude/Longitude (lat/long) is the most accurate location data currently available, yet it’s estimated that only 10-15% of smartphone traffic has true lat/long.
Targeting consumers based on a set radius around any given point – be it an exact address, zip code centroid, etc. – is often called “geo-fencing.” This well-known targeting method is used to better reach the most relevant audience base related to an advertiser’s goals and needs. Ads are targeted within a neat little circumference and any consumers that happen to fall outside that virtual fence are excluded from ad placement.
Yea, but the only problem here is that people on their mobile devices are constantly on the move and usually they are capture in large numbers which result in a lot of people not even wanting mobile ads delivered to them.
As I’ve said before. Their really is only a handful of true “players” in the mobile advertising Industry and these are the ones who get it right, or at the very least, are trying too. The others are just coat-hanging ticks looking for their piece of the pie by plugging into the major players, marking up their original traffic prices, arbitraging it out to advertisers whom know no better.
So in short. Track everything.
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