GasBuddy Enhances Targeting Capabilities With Cuebiq Partnership

GasBuddy is upping the ante on consumer targeting and audience insights from its mobile apps, announcing a partnership with location intelligence firm Cuebiq that will give major brand advertisers better ways to reach audiences on their path to purchase.

With more than 60 million users and two million daily price submissions, GasBuddy’s flagship mobile app is among the most popular in its category. Users have the ability to report on and view the real-time prices at more than 140,000 gas stations throughout the United States, Canada, and Australia. Because the mobile app is free for consumers, GasBuddy relies heavily on major brand advertisers for support.

Through its new partnership with Cuebiq, GasBuddy will be better able to gather insights about its mobile users, including frequency of specific gas station visits, fueling patterns, brand loyalty, and time spent at specific locations. The information should give GasBuddy the ability to better quantify the impact of advertising campaigns for brand partners, and also deliver more relevant experiences for its users.

“We have a huge opportunity to create relevant connections between the consumer, local retailers and brands,” GasBuddy CEO Walt Doyle told Street Fight.

The company is fueling its new initiatives with the help of Cuebiq’s AudienceQ geo-behavioral audience segmentation and enrichment tool and VisitQ footfall attribution tool. The location intelligence firm is working closely with GasBuddy to help the company analyze how specific native advertising campaigns impact in-store visits and traffic patterns.

“We see a strong interest in the marketplace for Cuebiq’s audience segmentation and enrichment tools as a means to enable publishers to better understand their audiences in order to improve their UI, deliver more appropriate content, better target their advertising and accurately measure the results of their campaigns,” says Antonio Tomarchio, founder and CEO of Cuebiq.

Although the partnership is still in its infancy, Doyle says his company has already started seeing the types of results it can take action on. For example, 43% of GasBuddy users spend more time in the gas station convenience store than the average person. This data could be used not only to justify the value of in-app advertising campaigns, but also to better personalize the campaigns that GasBuddy promotes.

Some of the more innovative advertising options that GasBuddy offers for brands include proximity-based native listings, sponsored “challenges” for consumers, and sponsored in-app price hike alerts, which notify consumers when prices are about to go up in their local areas. GasBuddy also promotes more traditional mobile ad offerings, like in-app banners and native ads that are integrated organically within the user experience. Brands can advertise across GasBuddy’s network of more than 250 localized websites with geo-targeting and site-level targeting, as well.

GasBuddy isn’t the first technology firm to look for more accurate ways to quantify the impact of in-app advertising. Major brand advertisers are quietly shifting their budgets from mobile web ads to in-app ads thanks to higher click through rates, which average 0.56% for in-app vs. 0.23% for mobile. In-app mobile ad spending is expected to reach $16.9 billion by 2018, up from just $3.5 billion in 2013.

Cuebiq’s specific platform has already been integrated with more than 150 developers in categories that run the gamut from weather and utilities, to social media and messaging.

“Enrichment has turned into a hot button for developers looking to better understand their audience, better target their ad campaigns, and better measure them,” says Tomarchio.

Tomarchio is he’s hopeful that this new partnership will help GasBuddy better understand its advertising clients. He says his firm has been able to differentiate itself from competitors with turnkey geo-location solutions and a unique set of data that precisely measures location, dwell time, and visit frequency at millions of mapped points of interest across the United States.

Doyle says this new partnership with Cuebiq is just the first step in GasBuddy’s expansion, as the company plans to increase its offerings to consumers and brand advertisers. Doyle ultimately wants to see his company offer more relevant retail experiences to its users.

“This partnership adds to GasBuddy’s already robust knowledge about the consumer purchasing habits in the gas station convenience store space,” Doyle says. “For our retail gas station convenience store partners, we will be able to provide additional value to help improve their bottom-line.”

Stephanie Miles is a senior editor at Street Fight.