GroundTruth Takes on Cost-Per-Visit ROI with New Platform

Every business that targets local wants to solve the mystery of balancing ad spend versus the real revenue their campaigns drive home. Pouring money into mobile ads while simply hoping the breadcrumbs draw customers to a location does not suffice. That is where location data company GroundTruth believes it can inject itself into the equation.

Today the company announced the rollout of its Ads Manager platform, which will calculate the cost-per-visit for campaigns along with provide other services. GroundTruth says this is the first location-based ROI metric of its kind for mobile advertising.

GroundTruth CMO Eric Hadley says his company’s data and location information gives its customers and partners more ways to understand how they can use location. The introduction of Ads Manager broadens that scope by giving them an affordable means of making data actionable. “It is the power of location brought to the masses,” he says.

With a cost-per-visit model for ads, Hadley says, quick-serve restaurants for instance can understand how their campaigns are received and fine-tune them to drive customers to their locations. The Ads Manager platform, he says, lets marketers to see how the money they spend translates into revenue, especially in the restaurant industry where visitor intent is almost always to dine.

The data and intelligence GroundTruth has gathered, he says, lets businesses discover target audiences that are near their locations often and then tailor ads to better attract that audience. Campaigns can be run and directed through the Ads Manager platform, Hadley says, once the marketers get a feel for the information it provides and the intent it reveals. Then it is up to the business to decide what the appropriate strategies might be to draw in consumers. “You may see a ton of people who come by one of your restaurants but not another one,” he says, “so how do you balance that?” With Ads Manager, businesses can build up models and test different customer segments to improve the targeting of their campaigns.

There is increasing demand to show real results with mobile ads for local, making it vital for marketers to find actionable data to help shape their campaigns. “You have to prove on the local level what’s making gains,” Hadley says. “If you’re a marketing manager, you need to find the platform that is empowering you to make decisions and see the ROI on getting customers to come in.”

GroundTruth draws upon data on the location of some two-thirds of all smartphones, Hadley says, and leverages that data as a primary expression of consumer intent. The company gathers this location data on consumers who visit stores and other sites after receiving ads. Through the Ads Manager platform, individuals can be targeted to visit specific stores. This is an alternative to pushing ads to all phones in a several mile radius around a location.

A select group of GroundTruth clients, such as Ted’s Montana Grill, have already been using the platform, Hadley says. Ads Manager offered better attribution of the restaurant visits in relation to its mobile ads in for Ted’s Montana Grill that translated into a 10x return on ad spend, he says. For retail establishments and restaurants that compete in sectors where consumers often have many choices, Hadley says, data can help such businesses understand customer behaviors. “Harnessing location power to get people to make a visit, to be in the CPV model, is so important,” he says. “That’s really where the power of the location data at the massive scale that we have shows its value.”

Though Ads Manager is being used by major enterprises, according to GroundTruth the platform is designed and priced so that companies of all sizes can make use of its services and technology. He says Ads Manager allows most anyone manage campaigns from the platform. “The barrier at this point is just having a credit card,” Hadley says.

Hadley admits there are plenty of location technology offerings on the market. However he says GroundTruth has an advantage when it comes to helping marketers connect with customers who have a history of making big-ticket expenditures and then attract them to a store for a transaction. The cost-per-visit model, Hadley says, demonstrates the power of campaigns by opening the door for improved targeting based on intent. “Every marketer in every business is trying to drive the maximum return for the money they spend,” he says.

Joao-Pierre Ruth is a Street Fight contributor.