PlaceIQ Adds Location Analytics To Help Brands Understand Real-World Behavior

In a push to buttress its ad targeting business, PlaceIQ has added two new analytics products, PreVisit and PIQ Analytics, that aim to provide marketers with a better understanding of their audiences by drawing insights from consumer’s location data.

Over the past three years, the company has developed a location analytics technology that analyzes over half a trillion location data points to understand the context and behavior of a location, which, for the most part, has been used to target mobile ads. Last year, PlaceIQ launched Place Visit Rate (PVR), a metric to attribute mobile advertising to in-store visitation. The company believes that PVR, coupled with the new features, will allow marketers to better optimize their campaign based on insights drawn from real-world behaviors.

One of the capabilities rolled out, PIQ Analytics, which was built on top of the PVR technology, provides brands with a deeper understanding of relevant demographic and behavioral trends at play within its data set, providing a more accurate window into their customer’s path to purchase. The second capability, PreVisit, can show marketers where devices go before they visit a certain location.

“We think there is an opportunity to digest a huge diversity of all these data sets and new signals that have been created, and use that to better understand consumer behavior and create applications that we think can be impactful for consumers and businesses,” said Duncan McCall, PlaceIQ’s CEO. “You can now understand how a consumer behaves and you can use that in a multitude of fashions.”

By building profiles around a device’s location history, PlaceIQ can more accurately attribute certain behaviors to certain devices. For example, if a device is at a sports game, the technology can attribute that consumer as being at a sports game; but if the device was previously identified at a sports game, it can then make that connection and peg the consumer as a sports fan, according to McCall. However, that type of behavioral targeting means they also need to give the consumer the ability to opt out.

“On both the Android and iPhone, you can opt out of behavioral targeting on the device,” said McCall. “Every single advertisement where we are doing behavioral advertising based on location history, there is [a button] you can click on and opt out of that kind of targeting.”

After receiving a patent for its methodology of profiling a user of a mobile computing device in July, PlaceIQ plans to continue to build out its location analytics product.

“For us mobile is not just the means to an end for better advertising, it is truly a fundamental paradigm shift with everyone running around with smart devices providing this new world of how consumers behave, and better ways to take advantage of that, and I believe analytics is the first step towards that,” said McCall.

Myriah Towner is an intern at Street Fight.