Using this new integration, merchants using Commerce Cloud will be able to turn local inventory data into local product listings on Google Search and Google Maps and in the Shopping tab.

Why we care. The distinction between digital and real-world commerce continues to collapse. Those online shopping behaviors that exploded during the pandemic will be with us for the foreseeable future, but it doesn’t mean store visits are a thing of the past.

Rather, consumers are looking for seamless connections between an online product discovery experience and in-person purchases. This integration seeks to support that aim at a granular local level.

The Salesforce data that supports the move can be found here.

Embedding commerce in discovery. The integration also braids together online discovery and the commerce experience. Just as many merchants now seek to provide a frictionless transition from finding a product online to making a digital purchase, this sees the opportunity to link discovery with in-person shopping.

This move pairs with the recent announcement of Salesforce’s Einstein GPT for Commerce that combines proprietary and generative AI models with real-time data such as customer demographic data and shopping history, to automate and tailor shopper recommendations in Commerce Cloud.

Dig deeper: A roundup of the latest AI-powered marketing technology releases

The post Salesforce, Google partner on local commerce appeared first on MarTech.

For example, what if you could send a discount offer on a product or service by text message when a customer enters a pre-defined location, such as your brick-and-mortar store? Or remind your customers that it’s happy hour — and that you offer two-for-one appetizer specials — when they’re near your bar or restaurant.

Delivering offers to target customers is the key benefit of location-based marketing.

The means to deliver location-based marketing is in place and familiar. Mobile phones are ubiquitous, providing the device necessary to deliver messages to consumers wherever they are. And, consumers expect to receive ads and offers on those mobile devices. Advertising on mobile devices captured the largest share of digital advertising in 2022 at $34 billion. (Overall, spend on digital marketing was a staggering $77 billion.)

In this article, you’ll learn the importance of leveraging data from users’ mobile devices to create ads, offers and other content that drives business.

We’ll define location marketing and describe several location-based marketing methods.

Table of contents

• What is location-based marketing?
• Location-based marketing targeting methods
• The benefits of location-based marketing
• Challenges of location-based marketing
• Additional resources

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

What is location-based marketing?

Location-based marketing (or “proximity marketing”) delivers ads and offers to potential buyers based on their location. There are two ways to identify the locations of potential buyers: 

• By GPS coordinates on a mobile device.
• By deploying Bluetooth-based “beacon” technology to trigger ads or alerts when consumers are in places (i.e., stores) that GPS signals can’t always reach. 

The major difference here lies in how location data is generated. (Beacons transmit information very short distances. They are used within locations like store aisles.)  

Relevance is a key benefit of location marketing. Instead of pushing generic ads across channels and hoping that some of it resonates, location-based marketing lets marketers to deliver highly targeted messages that reach consumers as they go about their daily activities. 

Location-based marketing works best for brands or businesses with retail locations. For example, a furniture store might send Presidents’ Day discount notifications to customers who have pulled into the parking lot of the mall in which the store is located during the holiday weekend. 

It’s worth mentioning another important type of location-based marketing that is inbound and doesn’t depend on mobile data. Sites like Yelp will show advertisements and promotions based on user behavior, including the locations and types of businesses explored on the site.

Location-based marketing targeting methods    

There are three primary methods of location-based marketing, which target customers based on where they are, where they have been and where brands would prefer them to be.

Geofencing: Reach them where they are

Geofencing uses a variety of location services to pinpoint where consumers are in real time and is deployed by software that is contained within mobile apps. Geofencing is enabled only when customers share their locations from within an app. 

The geographic area has boundaries, hence the term “fencing.” An example would be a radius around a store, restaurant, neighborhood, etc. When people enter or exit the boundary, messages are delivered. 

Starbucks uses geofencing to send rewards program members discounts on drinks they regularly order when those customers are near cafes.

Geotargeting: Reach them where they’ve been

Geotargeting relies on reaching people based on where they’ve been and what actions they might have taken when they were there. 

Geotargeging enables marketers to send targeted content to specific groups or those who have engaged in specific behaviors. 

A restaurant may want to promote a new brunch menu, for example. It might build a campaign for customers who have visited recently to drive return business. 

Geoconquesting: Get them to go somewhere else

Geoconquesting delivers notifications to customers when they are near a competitor’s business. 

In one well-known example, Burger King created a campaign called the “Whopper Detour” to target consumers within 600 feet of McDonald’s locations.

This clever — and popular — marketing strategy used geofencing to send coupons for one-cent Whopper sandwiches to users of the BK app, which was reportedly downloaded a million times over the course of a couple days during the campaign.

The benefits of location-based marketing

For marketers, there are many reasons to implement location-based strategies. 

By delivering ads, offers and information when potential buyers are near the point-of-purchase, merchants can increase foot traffic and improve customer experience, which in turn helps boost customer retention and loyalty.

Location-based marketing also offers a window into what customers want using insights gleaned from what they spend their time doing and how much time they spend doing it. 

Attribution of location-based marketing tactics tends to be higher than other channels. Measures of sales, in-store traffic, and engagement are more accurate because customers are using trackable mobile devices and apps. 

Challenges of location-based marketing

Location-based marketing is not without challenges.

This channel relies on marketers getting data only from mobile users who have opted in to location tracking and have downloaded the brand’s app.

Privacy is also a concern. Advertisers need to strike a balance between sending ads and offers when they will be viewed as beneficial to users, while avoiding the perception that location-based marketing is overly intrusive or creepy.

Dig deeper

Want to learn more? Here are some other great resources:

• Check out MarTech’s location marketing content page. 
• Mobile app experience developer Airship has some real-world examples here.
• Read HubSpot’s guide to local marketing.
• And here’s Yelp’s perspective on local marketing for businesses.

The post Why we care about location marketing appeared first on MarTech.

 “It’s a power struggle right now,” according to an anonymous advertiser quoted in the report titled “Retail Media Networks: A Forced Marriage or A Perfect Partnership.” “For many brand marketers, RMNs are seen to be a ‘have to buy’ versus a ‘want to buy.’”

Dig deeper: Why we care about retail media networks

Further, one advertiser said they “play defense as much as offense with retail media networks.” Explaining that because of “economic uncertainty and rising inflation, consumers can switch to private label and the retailers own these. We use RMNs to protect our brands as much as build our brands.”

The survey also asked respondents to share how their organization views their investment with RMNs, using a five-point scale ranging from “Valuable marketing tool” to “Cost of doing business.” More than a quarter (28%) it was the former, while only 31% said the latter. 

Some 42% placed RMNs exactly between those two extremes. “This should be concerning to RMNs and indicates that many brands are active but reluctant buyers,” the report said. “RMNs still have a job to do to prove their full value to marketers. This will be critical … if they expect to compete with and increase revenue from other non-RMN marketing platforms.”

Why we care. If RMNs are to continue growing it will be because of results not pressure. Retailers must clearly prove media networks’ value with useful, tangible data for metrics. They must demonstrate that these platforms can drive incrementality and positive ROAS for brands. 

RMNs do hold real value. RMNs do provide ROI. Consider this: From May 1, 2021 to the end of the following January, more than 23,500 companies bought RMN ads, per MediaRadar. Retailer pressure alone can’t make that happen. Further proof of their value can be seen in the 56% of advertisers using five or more RMNs, with 40% using five to nine, and 16% using 10 or more.

More than half (52%) of companies expect that RMNs will be viewed more positively as a “valuable marketing tool” in the very near future.  Both advertisers and retailers are already taking the steps needed to make this happen. 

Brands say they are doing the testing and calibration needed to improve and optimize the activation and performance of RMNs against business objectives and KPIs. This will be greatly helped by measurement standardization and transparency from RMNs, something that companies expect to happen.

“RMNs check a lot of boxes for advertisers. They have become foundational to integrated marketing plans,” said one advertiser interviewed in the study.

Download the full ANA report here.

The post 88% of brands say they’re pressured to use retailers’ media networks appeared first on MarTech.

“From initial search and discovery, through the ordering and post-meal engagement, consumers want a seamless and personalized experience catered to their individual needs,” said Perry Turbes, CEO of HungerRush, in a release.

The data comes from “The RushReport: The 2023 Restaurant Consumer Experience Report” from HungerRush, a restaurant management solution. The report is based on a survey of 1,000 U.S. adults.

Why we care. The data from HungerRush (which, of course, has skin in this game) is compelling because it echoes a message we’re hearing everywhere. Consumers (across the board; in this case, literal consumers) are blurring the lines between physical and digital.

It used to be that going to a restaurant or a bar — and ordering — was very much an in-person activity. Even grabbing takeout usually involved walking into a place and talking to people. Indeed, these things still happen. But now diners also expect the option of a digital experience, for wine and liquor as well as food delivery, from discovery to providing feedback.

You don’t have to be involved in restaurant marketing to hear the message loud and clear.

Dig deeper: How Allied Beverage is transforming customer experience

Pandemic effects. As with everything from grocery to apparel shopping, COVID-19 changed the way diners interacted with restaurants. In addition to the use of QR codes to view menus and apps to place orders (in-house as well as remotely), the pandemic accustomed diners to reading menus online, ordering online for delivery or pickup, and eating as well as working at home.

33% of the sample preferred takeout because they wanted to eat at home. Over 40% are looking for more innovative ways of ordering, including by text.

Online discovery. 60% go to Google Reviews or Yelp before trying a new restaurant while 85% say it’s important to be able to find reviews online. Just over a third discover restaurants on social media, but word-of-mouth from friends and family trumps that with over 60%.

Third-party delivery marketplaces and reservation marketplaces also provide opportunities for restaurant discovery. “Up-to-date presences on digital platforms like Google, Yelp, and social media are now table stakes,” the report says.

The post Digital experience is important to diners too appeared first on MarTech.

The mere mention of the controversial company’s name generates a range of emotions — often negative with a tinge of despair.

At best, business owners are frustrated with the volume of sales calls they receive. At worst, they are receiving many negative reviews they don’t know how to handle.

We work with many multi-location and franchise businesses daily to improve their Yelp presence, and I can definitively say that the despair is often unnecessary. Yelp is not a black box but a nuanced platform you can navigate to your advantage.

Here are five facts about Yelp that, if understood and embraced, can morph that despair into determination to turn Yelp into a positive asset that helps the business.

1. The filter is fluid

The Yelp Filter, which has been rebranded as Yelp’s Automated Recommendation Software, is the most frustrating part of Yelp for many business owners, so let’s address it first. Many reviews come into Yelp, appear on the page for a day or two, and then disappear.

These reviews are stuck down in a “not recommended” section, causing them to no longer be (easily) visible. This does not impact the overall Yelp score.

To find these filtered reviews, scroll to the bottom of the page and find the light gray text referencing them:

The filter can be a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, some of your great reviews can slip into the filter. But, on the other, some of your 1-stars might slip into it, too.

Those lost 5-star reviews are painful. However, when something slips into the filter, all hope is not lost. We know the filter is fluid, so a review that initially goes to it can be pulled back out.

While Yelp has removed much of its documentation surrounding this topic, they stated years ago that every Yelp review is automatically evaluated by Yelp’s recommendation software based on quality, reliability, and user activity on Yelp. More often than not, those useful reviews come from active members of the Yelp community. 

The key phrase here — and what you can actually do something about — is “user activity.” Oftentimes, those reviewers relegated to the filter have just a handful of reviews and minimal friends on the site.

If you can identify the customer who left a positive review in the filter, you can reach out to them and let them know their great review is being hidden because they aren’t active on Yelp. Additionally, you (and other employees) can add them as friends and mark their reviews as useful and cool.

In years past, we found that de-filtering positive reviews could pull upwards of 20% of 5-star reviews out of the filter. 

But more recently, the impact of these engagements has been dwindling. Even so, increased engagement with one’s profile will always stand out to Yelp in a positive light.

2. Use caution when discussing Yelp with your customers

Yelp has done a poor job in the past of communicating their policy on how businesses can ask for reviews. You’ll hear people claim, “Yelp says you can’t ask for reviews!” 

And indeed, Yelp has pages on their site that indicate that position.

However, a few years back, I emailed Yelp asking explicitly if businesses can ask customers to leave a review on Yelp, and they replied

These mixed messages confuse business owners, so our advice to clients on getting Yelp reviews is to understand the policies well:

• Don’t ask anyone to review your business, be it customers, mailing list subscribers, friends, family, etc.
• Your staff should never compete to collect reviews.
• Don’t ask for reviews after requesting customer feedback in other places like surveys or contact forms. While it can be tempting to ask this of customers, it is against Yelp’s policy and unfair to other businesses.
• Don’t offer freebies, discounts, or payment in exchange for reviews—it will turn off savvy consumers and may also be illegal. For the same reason, you can’t offer incentives for users to remove reviews. Yelp has a Consumer Alerts program that publishes a pop-up alert on business pages to let people know when we learn about this sort of activity.

When you know a customer is happy, it’s very natural to verbally ask them for a review as a follow-up. We advise our clients never to ask for reviews in writing. 

Even in a verbal discussion, understanding the right way to phrase this conversation when it comes to Yelp is very important because of the rules in this area above. 

You may want to tell the happy customer to “check out your Yelp page” and “consider leaving feedback” instead of saying, “please go to our Yelp page and leave your 5-star review.” 

It’s a big no-no to try to solicit positive reviews directly, whether it’s verbal or written via email or text message, and you should never offer an incentive in return for a review. 

Lastly, avoid having customers leave a review on Yelp in your store, as the location may get their review flagged.

3. Flagging does work, and you can ask for a re-review

When a negative review comes in for a business I’m working with, I first assess the content to see if anything violates Yelp’s Content Guidelines. Not all reviews violate them, but if there is anything questionable, it is certainly worth a shot.

The Content Guidelines are short and worth understanding well. I often find myself quoting aspects of the guidelines when I flag a review and request its removal. 

I look at flagging as my chance to play armchair lawyer. I’ll write a compelling case, citing evidence from the review and text from the content guidelines to build a compelling plea for removal.

If there is a violation and you’ve highlighted it well, you will receive an initial email stating, “Thanks for the report!” 

This email will give you a tracking number in case you don’t hear from them with a status update, and you can always send them a follow-up with that number.

Once Yelp has decided whether to remove the content you reported, they will send one of the two follow-up emails, as seen below. 

However, if you don’t agree with their final decision, you can escalate a review for further consideration by accessing Yelp’s Questionable Content page, where you can add your case number and state why you don’t agree with any comments.

Continuing the legal analogy, consider this escalated review an Appeals/Supreme Court ruling. They are likely to agree with the previous ruling, so you must make a strong case for it to be reversed.

The success rate is lower here, but they will do a re-review and reverse positions if the appeal is compelling.

4. You need to understand the environment — it is gray, not black and white

I often see business owners and marketing directors who have great angst with Yelp as a platform but don’t actually use it personally. I always encourage them to set up a profile and get active, as there is no better way to understand the platform and the mindset of its users. 

As “The Art of War” says, “Know thy enemy.” (Indeed, many business owners and marketing directors consider Yelp the enemy!)

When business owners start using Yelp and leaving honest reviews, they’ll see the little things that make a big difference from a consumer experience perspective. They can now apply this new lens to their own business and make improvements so that future Yelp reviews have a better chance of being positive.

Great customer service, a generous return policy, friendly staff, cleanliness and flexibility are some common characteristics of businesses that do well on Yelp.

Taking advantage of everything Yelp offers is crucial for all business owners. Working with your Yelp rep to host Check-In offers can help to generate more reviews that will more than likely stay on the page and out of Yelp’s filter since they can see that customers were actually at this location. 

Yelp encourages everyone to download and use their mobile app, which is another reason that check-in offers could help to increase the number of customer engagements on your page. 

5. Your sales contact can do more than sell you ads

Yelp’s sales team is aggressive — sometimes too aggressive. They can drive busy business owners crazy by calling weekly to inquire about advertising on the platform. However, we’ve found that their eagerness to start a dialogue can be used in your favor.

In one instance, we worked with a company that had moved their location just a few blocks down the street. However, instead of updating their Yelp profile address, Yelp “closed” their old location page and started a new page for the new address. 

This was an issue because their previous page had 50+ hard-earned reviews and a 4-star rating. We tried all of the recommended routes by Yelp to resolve this to no avail.

Then, we brought the issue up with the eager-to-help sales team, and it was fixed in just a few days. We didn’t promise the salesperson anything. We simply brought an issue to them and said that we wouldn’t discuss any advertising until something they broke with our business was corrected.

In another case, we had a business whose corporate headquarters was on Yelp. While their individual business locations might belong on Yelp, their corporate headquarters services no customers and shouldn’t really have a Yelp profile.

We tried to get Yelp to remove the page, but we were continually denied. We then explained the issue to our Yelp ad rep, and they took the page down.

If you have a problem with your Yelp profile and feel stuck, discussing it with your Yelp sales rep doesn’t hurt.

What to do next

First, get active on Yelp. If you don’t have a profile, set one up and install the mobile app. As we mentioned previously, Yelp loves to see people using the app. Begin checking into businesses and leaving reviews.

Beyond that, it pays to sit down and think through a Yelp strategy. You can do some initial triage work on existing reviews, but you should also develop a clear plan for how you will get new 5-star reviews over time. Use the Yelp improvement calculator to determine how many positive reviews you need to reach your milestones and goals.

You’ll also want to analyze your customer touchpoints to ensure they are handed in a way that would elicit positive organic reviews.

The fact is that Google’s hand has been forced (literally, by Congress) to show Yelp in the search results, so they aren’t going anywhere. You should be working on a Yelp strategy if you don’t have one already.

This article was researched and written with the help of Samantha Hughes.

The post 5 Yelp facts business owners should know (but most don’t) appeared first on MarTech.

“A lot of money and a lot of time and resources are going into attracting the consumer to come to different retail locations,” said Charm Bianchini, senior director, demand generation and field marketing for location intelligence company Near, at The MarTech Conference. 

In many cases, meeting customers where they are means understanding how close they could be to a physical store.

“Human movement data can improve your targeting, which then increases your ROI,” said Bianchini.

Dig deeper: Real-world location data analytics tools during the pandemic

Where location data comes from

Location-based data — or human movement data, as the Near people call it — is gathered primarily from mobile apps. 

Popular games like Zynga’s Words with Friends will ask players to consent to share location data under terms that allow that data to be used in campaigns.

For marketers, location data is third-party data that gives insights into traffic patterns in a region, city or neighborhood. Identity resolution tools can also be used to add additional layers of data to the consumers in that traffic.

Interpreting location data for marketing campaigns

Here’s an example of location data taken from two different events, one week apart, at Sofi Stadium in Los Angeles.

It’s apparent from the location-based data and other consumer intelligence that the event on the right was a smaller, local event. The following week, depicted on the left, was larger and attracted visitors from farther away. 

Household income data and consumer preferences can help inform marketers for specific brands

“If you’re a restaurant, for example, you could use this to your advantage,” said Bianchini. “If you’re Red Lobster and you know that people are coming to your location, why not offer some of your loyal customers some sort of discount? Or if you know that everyone’s going to Church’s Chicken, you might want to offer a promotion to come to KFC.”

She added, “This is the power of human movement data and really being able to access real-time information on what’s going on with people.”

Using location data for customer acquisition

Marketers can use digital channels to act on location data. They can connect with loyal customers through digital billboard ads when the data indicates that they are close to a specific site.

Also, if it’s known that a customer was at a store location, marketers can follow up with special offers to bring them back another time, or to buy something if they didn’t purchase a product on their previous visit.

Marketers can also make an attempt to attract customers who visited a competitor.

Enhancing first-party data and expanding campaigns

If your brand already has first-party data in customer profiles, they can be enhanced by location data. The location data for customers at a restaurant, for instance, can provide insights into when they visit and from how far away. This data is then merged with other first-party insights you might have about the customer, including demographics, purchases and other preferences.

Marketers then make a persona out of these customers to build out a strategy on how to reach them through a given channel, and at a certain time. If they visit on the weekends, they could be sent a mobile ad or email during the weekend about a specific deal that matches their interests.

Knowing more about these location-based patterns will increase efficiency for campaigns and boost ROI, according to Bianchini. By serving relevant, helpful ads, they can also build customer relationships and increase customer lifetime value.

Dig deeper: Yelp’s Custom Location Targeting

Advancing digital marketing with human movement data from Third Door Media on Vimeo.

The post How location data helps marketers acquire new customers and expand campaigns appeared first on MarTech.

As digital marketers, we know that insight is the key to personalization. In lieu of browser and device data, forward-thinking marketers are testing other insight-rich sources to build audience profiles that don’t rely on traditional bread crumb trails. I caught up with a few marketers to see what tools and techniques they are implementing to stay ahead of the game. 

1) CDPs and identity solutions 

Customer data platforms (CDPs) and identity graphs build a single view of a user, including explicit and implicit interests and preferences. This singular identity stitches together a host of signals to deliver a 360-degree view to power personalization without third-party cookies.

Working with an established CDP or identity platform keeps all the identifiers related to a customer in one place, including personally identifiable information (PII) like usernames and phone numbers, as well as non-PIIs signals like first-party cookies and publisher IDs. Marketers can leverage these CDPs or identity graph databases to build omnichannel views for customers and prospects, enabling them to create personalized ads and messaging across various touchpoints.

Marketers who work with CDPs or identity platforms can capture data from over a hundred touchpoints, and build a unified view across their entire CRM to drive personalized messaging. Using advanced analytics and modeling, marketers can create a variety of personalization scenarios based on different channels, intent signals, and propensity scores for each user. And connecting the ad identifiers using a virtual ID allows for not only converged addressability but also helps to drive cross-channel personalization.

2) Second-party data 

Another way to get around the loss of third-party cookies is to start building second-party data. This type of incremental audience data is created when a marketer combines their data with another brand or publisher data set to yield new insights and audiences beyond what is available in their own CRM or subscriber database.

The advantages of building substantial second-party audiences allow a marketer to expand their consumer data pool and, more importantly, provide access to more relevant consumer data than marketers would get with third-party cookies or data. Because second-party data involves combining similar yet disparate data sets, the yield is high on actionable insights. It will almost always perform better than a marketer who pays for aggregated third-party data.

This strategy is most useful for more prominent brands or marketers who have built an extensive database of customers. Finding a willing partner might not be easy for small businesses or newer companies that haven’t had the chance to build up their own first-party data. To make this strategy work, you must find a partner to share data with you and then disclose the relationship on your website if you share your customers’ data with another company. Building these second-party audiences has become a cornerstone service for data clean rooms or cloud service providers, including Infosum and Snowflake.

Dig deeper: Why we care about data clean rooms

3) Contextual advertising

For years, we’ve seen contextual targeting touted as an alternative to cookies. This approach focuses on the content consumed — the context of the blog post, video, or other content the person is engaging with — rather than personal information.

As a result, there’s little to no risk around data privacy. Yet, digital marketers can still offer highly personalized content and ads.

While contextual advertising is nothing new to marketers, what has changed is that AI is now used by more advanced providers that can get granular with contextual targeting. Marketers have a continuum of targets they can build personalization around, including metadata, titles, related keywords, comments, and more. By mining this information and looking for signals, marketers gain in-depth insights into their customers that are used for cross-channel personalization and messaging.

This ever-evolving world of contextual advertising and personalization may require marketers to brush up on their skill sets and learn more about how it works today and how it can be leveraged not only for addressability but as a tool for personalization. And, unlike older contextual marketing models that relied heavily on keywords, new contextual targeting tools rely on natural language processing and image recognition.

These more recent algorithms can also grasp the sentiment of pages and apps with unprecedented speed and reliability. Altogether, this enables marketers to display personalized ads in an environment that is both highly relevant for their potential customers and safe for their brands. 

4) Location and interest-based targeting 

Remembering that high-quality intent data for personalization can be captured offline is more important than ever. Where your customers and prospects go or hang out regularly can be equally crucial for insights and personalization opportunities. 

Location data companies like Safegraph, Simple.fi and Factual create rich audience profiles based on pre-determined points of interest and stitch them to their ID, or into cookie-free IDs like UID, for cross-channel and personalized targeting. These companies often have thousands of locations mapped, including quick-serve restaurants, airports, retail stores and golf courses, to name a few. 

Real-world insights from location data can drive personalization using explicit information, including the type of store or location visited, to inferred demographic, affluence and other information to allow for an additional lever to use when developing personalization models.  

In much the same way location-based data provides a slightly more “meta” approach to personalization, interest-based advertising bundles website visitors into broad content topics based on a visitor’s behavior. The most talked about of these interest-based targeting and personalization platforms is Google’s most recently proposed concept, Topics, which replaces its initial strategy, Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC). The idea behind Topics is that the browser learns about users’ interests as they surf the web and shares their top interests with participating websites for advertising purposes. All this happens behind their walled garden by categorizing the websites a user visits into a limited set of around 350 broad topics, such as gym-goers or sports car enthusiasts. 

When a user visits a website that supports the Topics API, the browser will choose up to three topics on their device from their most frequent topics in the last three weeks and share them with this website. The website and its advertising partners can then use these topics to determine which type of personalized ad to display. 

While the jury is still out on Topics, Google claims that Topics is more private and offers greater transparency and user control than FLoC and cookie-based targeting. Still, many specifics of the concept are yet to be released. 

5) Better first-party data for personalization

If you want to truly deliver personalized experiences, you need to know who your users are, and an email address is a great first step to building out their profile.

Amp up your user registration. Utilize all the touchpoints site where exchanging information for newsletter sign-ups, cart check-out, discount codes or loyalty programs. ‍

Build more robust customer profiles. Start small but capture as much information as you can about your customers. Integrate additional data collection touchpoints. Follow up with new email subscribers with quick buttons to capture preference data to better target content and products.‍

Engage with email and SMS marketing. Make the most out of email and text message to drive up customer engagement. Send personalized offers and content to users based on their behavior on your site and follow up personalized SMS for special sales, promotions, and discounts.

All in all, the demise of the third-party cookies and the constraints on device-level data doesn’t mean an end to ad personalization; marketers will be utilizing a host of alternate data and IDs to drive cross-channel personalization. Combined, these new tools and tactics will allow marketers to continue having personalized conversations with their customers and prospects. 

The post 5 paths to post-cookie personalized advertising appeared first on MarTech.

Dark patterns. The lawsuit accuses Google of using “dark patterns” (specifically: “repeated nudging, misleading pressure tactics, and evasive and deceptive descriptions of location features and settings”) to hand over more location data. Dark patterns are essentially “tricks” that a website or app can include as part of its design that make a user do something they might otherwise not choose to do.

Why we care. Location data is among the most sensitive information Google collects from consumers. Even a limited amount of such data, gathered over time, can expose a person’s identity and routines. Location can also be used to infer personal details such as political or religious affiliation, sexual orientation, income, health status, or participation in support groups, as well as major life events, such as marriage, divorce, and the birth of children.

Location data is even more powerful in the hands of Google, a company that has an unprecedented ability to monitor consumers’ daily lives due to the near ubiquity of Google products in consumers’ pockets, homes, and workplaces—essentially everywhere consumers go. Google’s technologies allow it to analyze massive amounts of location data from billions of people, and to derive insights that consumers may not even realize they revealed. Google uses this window into consumers’ lives to sell advertising that is targeted to consumers according to personal details Google has learned about them, including their demographics, habits, and interests.

Google & Managing Location History. Google has an entire page dedicated to this topic, titled Manage your Location History. In short, this page tells you how to turn your location history on or off and delete your location history. Google encourages users to keep Location History on because it offers benefits such as “personalized maps, recommendations based on places you’ve visited, help finding your phone, real-time traffic updates about your commute, and more useful ads.” That’s the all-important value exchange — but it really has to be high value if a tech giant is going to know where you are.

The post Attorneys general sue Google over location marketing practices appeared first on MarTech.

Geofencing enables that. It should be a familiar concept by now. By taking advantage of existing cell phone networks, marketers can designate bounded areas near retail stores. Customers can be “pinged” with coupons and special offers if they are nearby — or if they are shopping at a competitor.

While geofencing looks like a great way to reach out to shoppers, there is a challenge in striking the right balance. Brands should not be spying on shoppers, looking to badger them to buy something. Geofencing done right requires the consent of the consumer. It also requires good judgment by the marketer as to when is best to reach out to that shopper.

Don’t confuse geofencing with beacons

Geofencing sometimes gets confused with beacons. They are alike, in that they are about locating likely buyers. But they diverge based on range and platform. Beacons run on Bluetooth. They only have a range of two meters and are useful for proximity location, Josh Francia, Chief Growth Officer at marketing automation provider Blueshift, told us.

Beacons are best used in-store, perhaps prompting a shopper to go to another section to buy an item associated with their purchase. For example, if a shopper is buying paint, a prompt would guide them to another section stocking drop cloth.

Geofencing works at a different scale, using a different wavelength. It can use WiFi, GPS or the existing cell phone network to reach possible customers within 200-500 meters of a location. The store will know who is “down the street or in the parking lot,” Francia said.

WiFi location is the most accurate of the three, but not always available, Francia said, while GPS also offers accuracy, but at the cost of draining the smartphone battery. Cell phone data is the least accurate, since it requires triangulation between several cell phone antennae. But cell phone service is mostly available and the battery hit is light, he added.

Pinging cell phones for data is not a new trick. This type of data has been around for the past 10-15 years, Francia said. “It took a while for companies to understand the value of the data.” Marketers had to learn how and when to pitch an offer. For example, it is pointless to serve a coupon to a consumer if they were likely to make that purchase anyway, he said.

The store has to gauge the likelihood of the shopper’s next interaction, and that requires creating a “universal profile” of that shopper as the basis for figuring out that “next best interaction,” Francia explained. “A lot of companies are still getting there…It’s a struggle to figure out the path.”

Geofencing for convenience

While marketers look for ways to sell, one use case can go overlooked — convenience. “Outside pickup is the biggest use case,” Inderbir Singh Pall, Senior VP and GM for the Commerce Group at mobile marketing platform InMobi. This can run parallel with a more typical use case: Personalizing an offer to a mobile user.

Both use cases are trust-based, so brands have to find ways to build that relationship with the customer. AI offers one approach, by managing recommendations and updating messages to fit the customer, Singh Pall said.

The vendor gains trust if they use data to communicate to the user, show an offer or provider curbside pickup, then the promise is made, the service or product delivered, and trust is retained, Singh Pall noted. “The reinforcement of a soft message [retains] trust.”

Data should always be used in accordance with policy, and that policy must be communicated to the customer, Singh Pall said. Without this mechanism, a brand runs the risk of being creepy. “Why is this coming?” a customer may ask, if the brand is reaching out to them out of the blue, he described.

The tech industry practice of “moving fast and breaking things” is really the wrong move, Singh Pall continued. Be conservative and practical, he advised.

Brands cannot spy on their customers. But it is not spying if a customer consents to revealing their location. “As an application developer, you must offer permission to the customer,” Francia said. Ideally, one should present a screen explaining the value to the customer of enabling a location service before presenting the screen that allows the user to “opt in”, Francia explained.

Do the right thing

When crafting a geofencing solution, marketers need to do two things: work with an infrastructure partner, and enforce data privacy regulations, Singh Pall stressed. Data governance has to run throughout product development, he added.

Francia came up with a similar checklist for brands. First, understand the technology you choose, its proper use case, and what value you are trying to generate. Second, understand that you are trying to deliver incremental opportunity. If you are trying to provide a coupon to a customer, you have to marry that with understanding other intent signals the shopper may be sending. Finally, “Marry geofencing with privacy, and be up front with the customer.” Francia added.

The post To know your customers, ping their phones appeared first on MarTech.

Good morning, Marketers, and did you miss me?

I used up some vacation days last week and was rewarded with some fine weather as I made a trip up to Rhode Island. In September, a couple of hours of drizzle mixed in with the sunshine still counts as fine weather.

About the last thing I did before I signed off was catch the live presentation by Larry Ellison explaining the Oracle Fusion Marketing launch. I thought it was significant news, especially as it implicitly reduces the role of CRM to a system of record for the last stages of the purchase cycle.

It looks like the news resonated with a lot of you, judging by traffic, and I’d like to know why. What is the significance of this move from the perspective of marketing teams? Email me here (and let me know if you want to stay off the record): kdavis@thirddoormedia.com.

Kim Davis

Editorial Director

How NYC & Co know where you like to go 

NYC & Co is responsible for nycgo.com, the official guide to the city, and it’s also behind the popular discounted dining event Restaurant Week. That’s all in plain view. What is less well-known is the value exchange with its business members, providing research and insights in return for membership fees. The quality and specificity of the insights provided has been transformed, said Jon Tesser, VP Research and Insights, by their use of Near, the global people-and-places intelligence platform.

“Near is the most important new source of data we could have asked for. With tourism data, basically none of it is real-time. The only real-time data we get is hotel data; it comes every week and we learn about hotel occupancy – that’s the only thing that gives us the pulse of the industry. Beyond that we don’t actually know what people are doing when they get here.”

Near’s roots lie in aggregating, resolving and segmenting vast quantities of consumer data for targeting and advertising purposes. Through two strategic acquisitions — Teemo in November 2020 and UberMedia in April this year — it acquired extensive location intelligence capabilities, resulting in the people-and-places intelligence proffer. It manages some 1.6 billion user profiles in about 44 countries, all anonymized and strictly compliant.

NYC & Co is now able to supply near real-time data about what visitors to the city do throughout their trip, providing its trade members with the ability to meet people where they are with the right messages.

Read more here.

Google Ads announces machine learning-based attribution models in new privacy landscape

“In a move away from last-click, data-driven attribution [DDA] will soon be the default attribution model for all new Google Ads conversion actions,” tweeted Ads Liaison Ginny Marvin on Monday morning. As Google works toward a move privacy-focused search experience for users, it’s also adjusting the available attribution models for advertisers.

DDA works by looking at all the touchpoints, like clicks and video engagements, on your Search (including Shopping), YouTube and Display ads in Google Ads to compare the paths of customers who converted with ones who didn’t. The model then identifies patterns among those interactions that lead to conversations. Over the coming months, Google Ads will be migrating existing conversion actions to DDA for many advertisers over the coming months, Marvin said.

Why we care. Attribution has long been an issue for marketers. This conundrum is especially salient as FLoC threatens to take away even more data from search advertisers — leaving them cobbling together data on their own. Google Ad’s machine learning attribution model seems to be Google’s solution to this lack of data. “Privacy-centric, DDA trains on real conversion paths & uses machine learning to measure and model conversion credits across touchpoints, even when cookies are missing,” added Marvin.

Additionally, DDA was previously only available to accounts with enough conversions in their recent history. Now, all accounts can run it and it’s replacing last-click as the default.

Many advertisers have claimed that the lack of data and reliance on machine learning makes their jobs harder (how can we optimize when we don’t know exactly what is causing success or failure?). This is another case where they will have to just trust the information that Google Ads is giving them without seeing the inside of the process. However, if done well, it could help many advertisers better understand which campaigns and ads are contributing to overall success throughout the funnel.

Read more here.

Data overhaul at Michael Kors

Michael Kors has met the challenges of a looming cookie-less world and increased privacy regulations by implementing a data overhaul over the last four years. They centralized their first-party data in the ActionIQ CDP and have ramped up their strategy to include segmentation, orchestration and targeting lookalikes.

The success within the Michael Kors marketing team has caught on, according to Sharon Kratochvil, Vice President Global Analytics at Michael Kors. Now the playbook is being expanded to two other brands owned by parent company Capri Holdings Limited — Versace and Jimmy Choo.

“The consumer doesn’t care that marketing can have separate teams responsible for paid media or email marketing or CRM or stores,” said Tamara Gruzbarg, Head of Customer Insights at ActionIQ. “She just wants to be recognized by the brand as the consumer. She expects consistent messaging and a consistent brand experience across all of the touchpoints, irrespective of where she chooses to interact with the brand.”

Gruzbarg pointed to a Gartner study that predicts that by 2025, 60 percent of direct-to-consumer brands will be organized by function and not channel. To adjust to this channel-agnostic experience, brands have to double down on their first-party customer data in order to cover all the bases.

“Gardner noticed this as a very important shift in the industry,” Gruzbarg said. “As brands are focusing on creating this holistic customer experience, they recognize the goldmine they have in the first-party data.”

Read more here.

Quote of the day

“B2B Marketing has become increasingly systematic driven by the over-adoption and over-reliance on technology. The result is a cookie-cutter, assembly line style of marketing that prioritizes measurement over customer needs. That prioritizes measurement of easy-to-move vanity metrics over actual effectiveness.” Chris Walker, CEO, Refine Labs

The post What is the significance of Oracle’s Fusion Marketing launch?: Tuesday’s Daily Brief appeared first on MarTech.