Powering the Payment Stream
For years, local search has fed consumers to a technological black hole. The systems on which local businesses rely to manage day-to-day operations have remained offline, relegated to legacy tools or silo-ed in digital products not built for the web. But that’s changing. Thanks to a number of new companies that are reimagining the way consumers shop and reprovisioning the systems that business owners use to monitor and transact the exchange of goods locally, that “source code” is coming online, filling a critical gap in the local commerce stack…
5 Keys To Making Local Listings Count
Local listing sites have mushroomed in recent years, sending local businesses scurrying to get their digital houses in order. In a Street Fight webinar Thursday sponsored by YP, David Mihm of Moz, and YP’s Deepak Thakral discussed the growing impact of listings in local search, and outlined a handful of first steps that local businesses can take to improve their presence online…
New Tool From Drawbridge Helps Marketers Bridge the Gap Between Desktop and Mobile
Seven months after bringing its flagship cross-device and audience retargeting products to market, Drawbirdge has launched a new mobile retargeting product that enables marketers to target existing users based on a previous activity – say, an app download – as they move across apps, mobile web, and desktop browsers.
Local M&A Activity Hits $7.2 Billion In First Half of 2013
Whether it’s through acquisition or investment, money keeps flowing into the local space. The first half of 2013 saw total investment activity, which includes both M&A and private financing, grow from a year earlier, as the number of deals stayed flat but total reported deal value jumped from $5.2 billion to $7.2 billion over the same period, according to a new report from BIA/Kelsey…
Digitas’ Leary: Brands Still Figuring Out the ‘Right Level of Local’
For brands, mobile has become more than a medium for advertising; it’s an invaluable source of customer data. Brett Leary, VP of mobile at Digitas, talked with Street Fight recently about the need to analyze location in terms of “context,” brands’ budding interest in shopper analytics, and “the right level of local.”
Winning in Local Commerce Means Solving the Data Issues in Discovery
The acceleration in the local consumer’s purchase cycle means that each layer of the the Local Stack of online-to-offline local commerce — find, buy, retrieve and engage — must fuse together and work to create a seamless local commerce experience. In the “find” layer, local search properties have expanded beyond point-of-interest data, investing in the rich content needed to help consumers make purchase decisions before leaving businesses’ sites…
Street Fight Daily: Apple Buys HopStop, RetailMeNot Soars In IPO
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology… Apple Buys 2 Mapping Companies (New York Times)… Coupon Site RetailMeNot’s IPO Soars 32% in First Day (Wall Street Journal)… Facebook Is Testing a Feature That Can Track Customers’ Physical Movements at Businesses (Terra)…
Privacy Hawks in Tow, Euclid Pushes Ahead With Offline Retail Analytics
Amid congressional queries and rumbles in the press over privacy concerns, Euclid is pushing ahead with its effort to bring Google Analytics to the physical world. The service, which uses wi-fi signals to provide brick-and-mortar retailers with store analytics, has released a major update, adding new metrics, industry benchmarks, and a substantial redesign to its dashboard…
Study: Facebook Sees Growth as Local Search Source
A new study by Yext finds that consumers have started to come to Facebook to find local information. The study found that a little over 12% of respondents used Facebook to find local information, nearly twice the number for specialized-sites and a few points shy of the Yellow Pages/Local directories…
Why Are These 5 Apps Tracking Your Location?
Data privacy has become a particularly prickly issue in the mobile marketing space. As brands shift more and more of their marketing budgets to mobile initiatives, many want to emulate the behavioral targeting of a data-rich desktop environment on the cookie-less mobile medium. A number of mobile apps have started collecting user location information despite the fact that it’s not particularly relevant to their function. Here are a few that might surprise you…
Why Local is the Future of Commerce
The past decade has seen a slow but persistent transformation in the set of services consumers use to navigate the local marketplace. One by one, technology firms have recreated or reinvented various layers of the local shopping experience, disrupting industries and opening doors for new ones to emerge. The transformation began in search, but companies have since started to rethink the way we buy and retrieve these goods and services as well as the way businesses reward, and retain, past customers, creating a coordinated “stack,” to borrow a term from computing.
Street Fight Daily: Retailers Track Shoppers In-Store, In Defense of Foursquare
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology… Attention, Shoppers: Store Is Tracking Your Cell (New York Times)… A (Modest) Defense of Foursquare (Inc.)… We Want Privacy From The Government, But We’re An Open Book On Social Media (Guardian)…
Leaf CEO: For POS Startups, It’s a ‘Race Against Time’
“Anyone selling software to SMBs would love it if distribution was through ecommerce or retail,” says Aron Schwarzkopf. “The problem with the industry however, is that SMBs have never reacted well to that. Remote distribution never worked. … But I do believe that five years from now the POS could be the gateway to the SMB. And that the way you will get to the small business may be through applications that work through the POS.”
Yelp Presses Into Commerce With New Local Delivery Product
Yelp launched a new product Tuesday that will allow customers to order food from participating merchants directly through its site or its mobile app. The move marks a seminal point in the company’s history, as the local discovery firm transitions from an information provider to an integrated local commerce service…
Bolstered By Bulls In North America, Global Mobile Ad Spend Jumps 82%
A new report from the IAB finds that global mobile advertising revenue jumped 82% in 2012, growing from $4.84 billion in 2011 to nearly $9 billion last year as smartphone adoption ramps and blue-chip marketers shift budget to mobile media. The bullish numbers, which are in line with other estimates, were bolstered by exceptional growth in the North American market…
With New Products, Factual Aims to Make ‘Big Data’ Smaller
After five years of ingesting, cleaning and packaging the world’s information, the startup is focusing exclusively on local, improving its geo-fencing product and moving up the data stack to build out a location analytics business. The company announced this morning that it has launched a new line of services aimed at helping mobile developers, publishers, and marketers make sense of the reams of location data collected from consumers…
Which Hyperlocal Startup Will Be Next to IPO?
“[The markets] are probably as, or in many cases, more open to [hyperlocal companies] today, largely because they’re seeing some early success in other models,” said First Analysis’ Todd Van Fleet. “They know it can be done; it’s just a question of having the right model. Whereas Groupon may have created a disconcerting tone across the space, you have had the success of Angie’s List, Yelp and even mobile payments players like Square prove that a portion of the [local business marketplace] can be won.”
How Bad Location Data Is Poisoning the Mobile Well
Marketers don’t have to be at the mercy of bad data. A number of vendors can help marketers sniff out embellished or inaccurate data using machine-learning algorithms to identify lat-longs commonly derived from a centroid. Advertising networks also have a small advantage over ad exchanges in that they can work directly with a publisher to ensure that only quality data gets passed along….
SMG’s Thompson: ‘Not One Client’ is Not Interested in Hyperlocal
“Across Starcom MediaVest’s portfolio, I cannot think of one client that is not interested in this space. You have consumer-packaged-goods (CPG) brands that are asking how location can help them best reach their audiences; you have auto manufacturers who want to reach people in real time at a given place; and you have travel companies that want to understand those audiences. Across the board, brands are curious about location. … They just don’t understand which technologies are out there, and how they can harness these signals and make sense out of them.”…