Factual Announces Deals With Apple And Facebook To Provide Improved Location Data

Truly, what the cookie was to desktop advertising, location data is to mobile. Location history is now evolving into a cookie substitute for mobile advertising, yet one that is far more accurate and powerful than cookies ever were.

In a move that indicates the growing importance of location data, Factual, a self-described “location platform,” has announced deals with Facebook and Apple.

“Our data stack is designed to distill down billions of pieces of information from millions of different sources into a clean, comprehensive, up-to-date database of places in 50 countries,” said Factual CEO Gil Elbaz, while speaking about the company’s recent location data deals with Facebook and Apple. “It incorporates new inputs in real-time and can quickly rebuild the entire data set as we improve the data stack itself, giving us an incredible amount of flexibility and agility in building data.”

Although many marketers see location data simply as a tool for real-time geofencing or proximity targeting, the data point can actually be used in a wide variety of ways, including gaining insights into customer behavior, and as an analytics tool to combine with other existing marketing channels. For auto dealerships, location data can also be used as a way to reach customers at any point in the future, beyond via proximity targeting.

“When it comes to mobile, location is the critical piece of data that’s underutilized,” explained Elbaz.

An interesting component of these developments is the fact that location can unlock specific audiences, and even hyper-targeted ones. Factual has built many “off the shelf” audience segments that it makes available to partners, such as in-market auto buyers, heavy QSR patrons and business travels, and others. Factual can also create custom segments, which illustrates the massive potential of location intelligence. As one example, the company recently helped a major American theme park identify the top 10 countries that its visitors came from. These insights allowed the theme park to target leisure travelers in their home countries and find lookalike audiences of potential visitors.

Some other examples of targeting very specific audiences include people who’ve visited a dentist in the past month, or female yoga enthusiasts. These types of specialized audience categories would be at least difficult to reliably target on desktop, if not impossible.

There are a number of platforms and providers that share this vision of location as a doorway into audience segmentation and targeting, among other use cases. In addition to Factual, some of these companies include Moasis, NinthDecimal, PlaceIQ, Skyhook, Placed, ThinkNear, xAd, Verve and YP.

Certainly, auto dealership marketers are becoming increasingly aware of the possibilities that arise from the power of location data. Some businesses are beginning to use location as a method for gaining insights into customer behavior, or as an analytics tool to help determine the effectiveness of other media channels. Lastly, some marketers are unleashing the power of location data as a means for reaching potential customers at any time and place, not just when they’re in close proximity to a dealership’s location.