Tag archives: Proximity Marketing

Online Analytics for the Physical World

Posted by Shaun Abrahamson on Sunday, 29 June 2008

Knowing what people say and knowing what they do, can be a powerful combination. Online marketing has capitalized on this via rich analytics to look at what people are saying or searching for and ultimately what they are buying. Web analytics is letting online marketers sort through the differences between what people say they do and what they actually do.

This is the core of online marketing’s advantage over traditional media. But what is happening where most of us still live? i.e the physical world.

Well, we have various profiling tools, such as affinity cards. So we can figure out how people are spending. But how did we land up in the store that day? A coupon code perhaps? We cant really be sure. We know things like 12m people are supposed to have visited this location.  But then we don’t really know where they went or where they came from (we think perhaps 25% are international based on surveys, for example).

But this is starting to change. Mutopo is working with one client to track in store movement, using signals from cell phones. The approach lets us show a location owner how people move around the space, not unlike what I might see from online analytics – navigation paths, entrance and exit points, time spent at certain locations etc. And so now, I can make changes in reality and measure the responses, not just changes in sales.

While we are working on a very local scale, we were excited to learn about Prof Tony Jebara’s new project, Sense Networks. Tony and his team are harvesting a variety of data sets to understand what people are doing – they are, in effect bringing online analytics into the real world.

Things like the most searched items on Google Trends might have realwold analogs such as the most visited restaurants. Or conversion reports might now be possible from outdoor campaigns, as you can get a real sense of the number of people who might have walked past a specific location.

The image on the left shows an example application to show the “hotspots” in San Francisco. These are literally the places you want to be if you are asking the question: where is everyone going tonight? Yes, its realtime. You can learn more about this app at Citysense.

It might be possible to know for sure how many more people in New York City have chosen to bike to work. I can start to see if more people are going to the new Ikea in Brooklyn instead of alternatives in New York City, such as Bed Bath and Beyond or the Container Store. Where I might have used Google Analytics to benchmark my site, now I can do the same for my store.

And we can now play what-if, in the real world. What if we:

  • change the layout of the store?
  • place new promotional signage at the hallway?
  • invest in signage alongside the highway?
  • purchase the locaton on 26th and 5th?
  • notice that more people are starting to cycle in NYC?
  • see more people dining out in a new area of town?
  • see more people going to Trader Joe’s than Wholefoods?

Its feels like we are on the verge of a significant change in how data from cell phones, GPS devices and the like can be analyzed in new and interesting ways. Good luck to Tony and the team at Sense Networks. We cant wait to see what people are going to do with your analysis.

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Proximity Marketing ROI

Posted by Shaun Abrahamson on Monday, 2 June 2008

Mutopo has been working with the team at Intera for some time. So we were excited to see them publish the results of a recent campaign with the Hard Rock Cafe in San Francisco.

There remains much to do, but we think that this can bring the type of measurement and control from online marketing to out-of-home which is usually limited to estimated impressions. To date, most of what we have seen for proximity marketing has focused on branding, which is interesting but harder to express in terms of ROI because it will be compared to other traditional options, but closing the loop with point of sale data to show ROI, makes this an easier sell for CMOs. One doesnt need to look at impressions, but can now look at sales tied directly to the campaign.

We think Google is already pointing the way, by finding more and more ways to bring online and offline together, particularly for local – whether using QR codes for print ads or coupons for local listings. And of course, the proximity tools built into Google Maps and Local Search, are already changing local search marketing.

Intera’s Bluetooth-based approach augments these new local marketing options because it enables targeting down to a few feet (so within a specific location such as a mall, for example), doesnt cost the user anything and is faster and more reliable than most 2.5g connections in the US. Mobile Marketer has all the details.

Posted in: Mobile, Product Development, Proximity Marketing | Tagged: , | No Comments