What NinthDecimal’s Growth Means for the Hyperlocal Marketing Industry

In an announcement that could be indicative of larger trends in the location-data space, the omnichannel marketing platform NinthDecimal recently announced its third consecutive year of more than 100% annual revenue growth.

This news comes as SITO Mobile, the insight-driven consumer behavior and location services company, announced fourth quarter media placement revenues of $14.7 million, and SOCi, the social media and reputation management platform for multi-location brands, announced year-over-year double-digit growth.

Could this be a tipping point for the hyperlocal marketing industry as a whole?

NinthDecimal president David Staas has been in the industry long enough to see its evolution first-hand, and he says retailers are increasingly turning to firms like his own as they prepare for battle against e-commerce giants.

“We’re seeing marketer priorities shift to better understanding what drives their business and their customer’s purchase decision,” he says.

Although NinthDecimal now bills itself as a marketing platform powered by location data, the company came from humble beginnings as a stand-alone data service back in 2014. Demand for these services fueled its growth, and today Staas says the company is being sought out for its solutions for building audiences optimized to visit, measuring visits and sales for all of clients’ marketing, providing media solutions that deliver customers to clients’ doors, and integrating e-commerce and in-store consumer data to build cross-channel marketing programs.

It was just back in November that the company expanded its existing Location Conversion Index and launched Website LCI, an always-on website-to-store attribution solution. Launching Website LCI was a strategic decision for NinthDecimal as the company continued its evolution as a marketing platform powering real-world conversions for brands. Staas says marketers have relied on media metrics for far too long to prioritize, optimize, and measure their marketing.

“We’re focused on what actually matters — real business results like visits and sales, whether for digital, TV, out-of-home, and others,” he says.

To that end, the company is now reporting 150% annual revenue growth across its platform in 2017. At the same time, the number of media companies, TV networks, and premium publishers integrated with NinthDecimal’s measurement platform grew to more than 250, and the company measured more than $500 million in media spend across TV, out-of-home, mobile, and other media formats.

“Only a few companies can bridge the online and offline worlds at scale, and we’re providing that for the open ecosystem outside the walled gardens,” Staas says. “As a result, in the last year we’ve become an integral part of the marketing plan to brands, agencies, and publishers to solve their biggest marketing challenges.”

When Street Fight interviewed CEO Michael Fordyce last year, NinthDecimal was seeing 150 million users a month. Just 12 months later, that number has grown to more than 190 million monthly active users, seen in nearly 10 billion locations per day.

NinthDecimal has also been able to double the number of TV campaigns measured for the second consecutive year, a success that Staas credits to the proliferation of new TV formals, mobile viewing habits, and the digitization of TV.

“Marketers are facing significant pressure to shift TV spend to digital video because it is more quantifiable. … Some marketers are already re-allocating budgets blindly, and it’s having an impact on their business. However, we’re one of the companies driving the ‘digitalization of TV,’” he says. “Our TV solutions are giving marketers the data to understand how TV—linear, addressable, OTT, etc.—and digital video perform based on the same set of real business conversion metrics. The need for quantifiable performance metrics for TV is driving our growth.”

Looking forward through the rest of 2018 and beyond, Staas says outsiders should expect to see more growth and expansion, both within NinthDecimal and the industry as a whole. With foot traffic measurement becoming an always-on KPI for so many brands, it’s become important for publishers to make sure they can produce performance metrics in order to unlock media spend on their platforms.

Staas says he’s also seeing more publisher interest in direct partnerships as a way to better understand foot traffic performance and optimize to these new high-demand performance metrics.

Stephanie Miles is a senior editor at Street Fight.