Survey: What Marketers Want from Location Data

A marketer might call it the three As: Marketers are increasingly turning to location data for attribution, audience insights, and analytics, according to a new report compiled by Research 451 and location intelligence firm Cuebiq.

That marks a change from past years in which location-driven tactics mainly amounted to mobile push marketing. As firms grow more comfortable with location data, they are seeking richer insights on who their customers are, whether they actually go to stores after seeing messages, and how future behavior can be predicted based on past information.

Marketers surveyed showed an especially keen interest in understanding how they can integrate location data with other kinds of information. Asked how they deploy location data, 27% said it’s a “key component of a broader strategy to map the customer journey online and offline.” Twenty-six percent, the second-largest segment, said they were interested in learning how to marshal location data in conjunction with other data to achieve more advanced goals than their current practices allow.

Concerns about data accuracy, walled gardens, and the fragmentation of data inventory hold marketers back from achieving loftier location-based ambitions. Fifty-three percent said they are concerned about location data’s accuracy. Forty-five percent said it’s difficult to integrate data from a number of different sources, and 44% said the walled gardens (e.g., Facebook and Google) make measurement a challenge.

To address concerns about measurement and fragmentation while quenching the thirst for attribution and greater audience insights, organizations should focus on breaking down silos between data sources. Marketers should insist that other decision-makers see location data as a holistic resource that boosts overall audience understanding instead of an isolated data point indicating where a customer was at a given time and allowing for proximity-based messaging.