Brief:

• The Tri-State Toyota Dealers Association drove 1,200 visits in a month to dealer lots with an ad campaign that relied on mobile location data for improved targeting, per an announcement. Location-based audience targeting urged prospective car buyers to visit specific dealerships in Delaware, Pennsylvania and New Jersey.
• The association worked with agency Saatchi & Saatchi and location-based ad platform GroundTruth to identify and reach customers who were most likely to be in the market for a new car. The campaign delivered 192,000 ad impressions to those prospective car buyers.
• Ryan Richmond, a senior media planner at Saatchi, said the campaign's results showed correlations between store performance and audience visitation. "This effort helped to drive specific, targeted shoppers to our dealer locations," he said in the announcement.

Insight:

The Toyota association's experience with location-based ads on mobile devices demonstrates the power of reaching customers at the right place and right time. Location data is key to understanding how mobile ads affect real-world behavior, and the association was able to attribute 1,200 in-person dealer visits to the 192,000 impressions delivered to a targeted group of mobile users. Whether those dealer visits led to actual car sales is unclear, but the location-based ad campaign caught the attention of potential buyers and compelled them to visit the dealer to learn more, hinting at the campaign's success.

Location-based ad personalization has given 91% of U.S. location data buyers a better understanding of their audiences, according to a Factual survey cited by eMarketer. About two-thirds (62%) of data buyers said they experienced more accurate targeting, while 35% saw an increase in store visits, the survey found. That difference may indicate that personalized notifications are more effective when based on past consumer buying behavior rather than a user's current location.

Location-based marketing has become a controversial topic among consumers who are worried about their online privacy. AT&T and T-Mobile last month said they would stop providing the real-time locations of individual U.S. customers to data resellers after a report indicated sensitive personal information is easy to get without informed consent. Concerns about privacy has led to growing threats of stricter regulation on cellular companies' data-sharing practices.