Category: Geolocation Technology

Pandora Media Inc. experiences location based marketing flub.

Pandora, the online radio company, gives mobile advertisers the ability to target their users through the zip code the consumer enters upon signing up but, what has recently been discovered, is that the trouble with this mobile marketing technique is if the advertiser’s customers do not manually change their zip code data in the event that they move, they will continue to receive adds that would only be relevant to their previous place of address.

Many mobile ads that use latitude and longitude for targeting a user’s location are inaccurate.

According to a recent Thinknear survey of 53 million ad impressions, only 34% of mobile ads that use geolocation technology for the purpose of targeting mobile users in a specific location are accurate within 328 feet (100 meters). Meanwhile, 27% are inaccurate by over 32808 feet (10,000 meters).

Thinknear General Manager Eli Portnoy said that mobile users on the go create problems for these apps. Although an application developer may believe to have the proper longitude and latitude coordinates that are equal to a one meter (3.2 ft) by one meter location on a map, in reality, these coordinates could be way off by hundreds of meters. Therefore, if an app publisher utilized the zip code that was entered in during sign up as a central point, the user could, in fact, be traveling in a completely different zip code.

Portnoy commented that “The industry is moving very, very quickly, and location is very hard.” He added, “A lot of publishers are not location experts, and they are trying to get location, and they don’t understand how.”

To boost its mobile marketing technique, Pandora has started to check IP addresses.

According to Pandora, the majority of its advertisers are interested in running large-scale campaigns that are nationwide. They have no interest in trying to reach mobile users who are located on a specific city block. For this reason, the internet radio company does not try for a target that would be narrower than zip code.

To enhance its more targeted advertisements, Pandora is now checking from where the IP address of a mobile device is coming and will notify a user to change their zip code if this is required. Pandora’s director of product management, Jack Krawczyk, said that the company’s surveys have revealed that its mobile marketing location accuracy scores are in the high 90s on a percentage scale due to the fact that people do not move that often.

Smartphone owners appear to be happy to opt in for geolocation technologies and the benefits they offer.

Although assumptions had been made that location based marketing techniques would put consumers off because of a feeling of being tracked and stalked, new research is showing that as long as the method is used properly, consumers can actually find it to be quite appealing.

Research conducted by Urban Airship, a mobile marketing provider, shows that consumers are happy to opt-in.

At the same time, though, new American legislation could actually create a dramatic change in the landscape for location based marketing using apps, as the concerns over the privacy of smartphone users continues to grow. There are some who have equated the use of geolocation technology to stalking, and they are determined to put a stop to it. This is interesting news as it appears to be in direct conflict with the sentiment of the majority of device using consumers, at the moment.

That said, as location based marketing has not yet become mainstream, consumers may not yet know its full potential.

As geolocation technology is only just getting started, many consumers may not yet be fully informed about what it entails and what risks it could pose to their mobile security. At the same time, it could be that consumers feel that the advantages still outweigh the potential risks and are willing to share their location with the applications on their smartphones and tablets.

Urban Airship conducted an analysis of 4 billion push messages that were sent by over 1,000 mobile apps. What they determined was that 62 percent of device users were fine with sharing their location to a provider that would send push marketing messages. Among those applications that were analyzed, the opt-in rates for providing location data ranged from an average of 60 to 80 percent.

The Urban Airship CEO, Scott Kveton, explained that the location based marketing analysis showed that “assumptions around consumers being reluctant to share location are false and massively short-sell mobile,” and pointed out that, on the whole, device owners “value the location-based functionality of apps.”