YP Announces New ‘Audience Cartography’ Platform for Targeting and Attribution
This morning YP announced the release of its new location data visualization methodology, Audience Cartography, which allows multi-location businesses such as restaurants, retailers, and auto dealers to refine advertising campaign targeting and establish attribution.
YP’s location data comes from several sources, including the information it collects from its own app as well as the in-app inventory it buys from the advertisers with which it partners. The company is also selective in the location data it actually uses for its client reports: YP discards almost 70 percent of the data at its disposal, presenting only the higher-quality figures to its clients, according to Bill Maslyn, director of digital ad products for national markets at YP.
Using this location data, YP provides an interactive click map on which businesses can see how many consumers have interacted with their campaigns. It is also now providing customers with store location heat maps that allow advertisers to gauge their success in courting customers of different sorts of demographics in various locations.
“Some of the key differentiators for us [are] the scale at which we’re able to do this,” Maslyn told Street Fight. “We can do much of this on a per-location basis; we’re not doing aggregate readouts of a store lift.”
First-party data may also help YP stand apart from the crowd. “Not only are we showing what location history tells us about [consumers], but we also have a search signal,” which allows YP to divide consumers into more informative segments, Maslyn said.
Maslyn says that with the location data it collects YP can establish attribution in a fairly straightforward manner.
Demonstrating the new platform, the company recently coordinated a campaign for an auto services firm that wanted to attract more consumers interested in services beyond rudimentary offers like oil changes. YP established attribution by tracking consumers who engaged with the client’s campaign and then visited the store to purchase the advertised services.
Audience Cartography marks the logical continuation of technologies and services YP has created before, Maslyn said, noting that the company has previously offered a location data-driven platform but is now working on better ways to package that data into actionable material for clients.
“We’ve invested in the tools to make sure we’re organizing that data, automating the collection of it tied to specific campaigns and specific locations so that we can service it as additional insights,” he said. “Audience Cartography is a big step forward for YP and the mobile product line here. It’s the ability to change the scale … and [meet] hyperlocal needs.”
Of course, Audience Cartography is only part of the many moving parts that go into YP’s multi-billion-dollar business. “We are more of a portfolio play. We have lots of different products and lots of different media channels,” Maslyn said.
With this in mind, the insights and data that come with Audience Cartography-driven campaigns can go beyond mobile or even the other channels YP works on. For example, clients using Audience Cartography to track consumers’ traffic partners on the way to given store locations can use that information to better target billboard campaigns, even though YP does not manage that channel.
Joseph Zappa is Street Fight’s news editor.