Which Location Data Vendor Is Right For You?
· Discover – Easily explore and connect with data providers across the globe.
· Source – Effortlessly benchmark data providers and their data offerings.
· Track – Efficiently track data spend, usage, compliance, and contracts.
As part of this mission, we’ve compared three of the leading location data vendors on the market: Reveal Mobile, GroundTruth, and PlaceIQ.
Each vendor offers some of the best location-based insights your business could want, but what distinguishes one from the other? To help you decide which vendor is the best match for your needs, or to let you benchmark them against your existing provider, we’ve analyzed the pros and cons of each vendor. With this, you can be sure you’re investing in the location data which will give you clear, measurable and successful results.
First up: Reveal Mobile.
Reveal Mobile puts unrivalled emphasis on the flexibility and customizability of the solutions its data offers. Its data output and delivery frequency are completely tailored to the buyer’s needs.
Reveal’s data lets you enrich the audience profiles you’ve already created, using US Census data and other sources, or build new ones. Reveal gives you full control over time scales (unlike most vendors, who confine insights to a 30-90 day period) and POIs (points-of-interest), so that you can target locations which are truly relevant to your business, not just the regular suspects found on POI databases.
Their VISIT Local platform has an edge over other location-based solutions thanks to its database of over 10 million US businesses, which is kept accurate and up-to-date, so you can reliably match consumer behaviour to business information. VISIT Local also allows users to create custom polygons, which allow you to create geofences that are better suited to your situation, rather than being restricted to only drawing a radius around a building.
The attribution solutions offered by Reveal Mobile are among the most sophisticated available. Their pixel tracking service sees when a customer has been served an ad online and made a return visit afterwards, allowing you to streamline your campaign to the highest degree of precision.
Reveal’s data can be applied to any platform the buyer is already using – including social media, audience marketplace, or DSP (demand-side platform). Similarly, the attribution and footfall reports that Reveal provides take all campaign channels into account, not just digital. These reports are especially useful because Reveal generates them in real-time, giving you freedom to adjust campaigns in-flight, and see patterns emerging over the whole industry, not just those specific to your clients.
That’s an overview of what Reveal Mobile has to offer. Next, let’s have a glance at GroundTruth.
GroundTruth’s data is first-class in terms of offered scale. It spans 21 countries and includes hundreds of millions of POIs.
The data goes beyond raw geographic data by also factoring in information about the weather. With over 10,000 weather sensors across the world working in symbiosis with footfall traffic and visitation data, you can trust that any data you buy includes all the relevant factors.
GroundTruth also offers further services to help you get the most out of your data. ‘Cost-per-visit’ (CPV) is an award-winning solution for increasing online-offline conversion. It eliminates the risk associated with campaign projections, as marketers only pay upon an in-store visit. Likewise, their unique ‘On-Premise’ geofencing strategy allows you to target areas as small as car parks and serve ads when people visit these locations.
GroundTruth boasts a whole host of high-profile clients, like Taco Bell, L’Occitane and BMW. These use cases testify to the results possible with GroundTruth’s insights, and how location data can dramatically raise brand awareness of even the largest global brands, resulting in increased consumer engagement both on- and offline.
So, GroundTruth has also earned its place as a location data market leader. Lastly, let’s see what PlaceIQ can bring to the table.
PlaceIQ’s Audience Discovery Dashboard is a self-service web tool which combines location and audience data to provide insights into three key areas: audience, market and competition. Intelligence about the patterns forming in all of these divisions will allow you to predict changes which will affect your brand and campaign.
With over 1000 audience segments, PlaceIQ ties location neatly to demographics. It emphasises how marketers can use their understanding of these audiences to discover brand loyalists, and to re-engage previous loyalists, taking the main movers and shakers of the industry in question into account. Factors like the average distance a customer is willing to travel come into play, allowing marketers to see where they’re missing out on footfall traffic.
Data from PlaceIQ is stringently monitored so that it complies with privacy regulations. As such, it’s a market leader for data which respects customer preferences. It centres its company activity around three ‘pillars’: notice, choice, and transparency. In 2020, it’s more crucial than ever that the data you’re using is collected through legal and ethical means, and PlaceIQ data gives you peace of mind that your location-driven campaign comes not at the expense of the consumer, but works efficiently and tentatively to provide the services they need.
As we’ve seen, each vendor offers tailored and versatile datasets, applicable to a wide range of marketing and advertising strategies. Let’s take a closer look at how they perform in more specific categories:
All three vendors are leading location data providers. However, to unlock location data’s true potential, it’s often used alongside other data types.
If your vendor can provide you with demographic data, for example, you’re in a better position to see who comprises your audience than if you were to examine footfall traffic alone. Likewise, if you realise as you’re developing strategies and campaigns that additional data would be of benefit, it’s easier to get this from the vendor you’ve already established a working relationship with.
Choosing a vendor which offers a range of data types prepares you for this eventuality. Save time and administration costs: if you can get all of your data from the same vendor, do so.
It’s not always the raw data a marketer needs, but the tools which the vendor offers based on that data. These products can prevent the marketer from investing in data which isn’t really relevant for their needs, thereby cutting down costs but still ensuring successful outcomes.
Reveal Mobile’s main products are VISIT Local and VIST Match. GroundTruth created Cost Per Visit and their SDK. PlaceIQ offers its Audience Discovery Dashboards and Place Visit Rate PVR®.
The scale of your data can be instrumental to your campaign’s success.
It may sound obvious, but imagine the frustration of investing in a dataset with the view to create geofences only to discover that the locations you plan to cover lie outside of your vendor’s boundaries.
In a Western context, digital marketing is primarily concerned with American and European businesses, meaning it’s easy to overlook the potential for reaching out to a global audience if your location data restricts you to one corner of the world. Before you opt for any vendor, check here to see which countries are covered by the data of our three vendors:
It goes without saying that your data must be high-quality for it to be useful. We’ve compared the sources and methodology used in each vendor’s data collection process so you can decide for yourself which will provide you with the most accurate representation of people and places:
Want your vendor to slot seamlessly into the data partnerships you’ve already got in place? Look and see which platforms and providers they’re supported by to make your investment in external location data as productive and effortless as possible:
The certificates and regulations each vendor follows are intrinsic to ensure that your data is legally and ethically sound.
For example, if they’re a member of the NAI, then they obtain consent from the user on an ‘opt-in’ basis, and are subject to annual privacy audits. The codes of conduct set out by the NAI and IAB also ensure that the data the vendor collects, buys, and sells is in from ethical sources, so that children under 13 and sensitive locations aren’t logged in the vendor’s datasets.
We’ve compiled this checklist based on each vendor’s online privacy policy:
Although marketers unanimously agree upon that location-driven strategies can transform company performance, external location data can be a costly commodity, especially if you’re investing in additional products offered by the vendor, too.
Subscribing to a vendor can be unwise if it becomes clear that the data they’re offering isn’t what you’re looking for. You could find yourself having to buy a new dataset, reducing your ROI, and incurring the costs associated with verifying your next vendor.
Fortunately, our three vendors all offer a data demo – the option of getting a free sample of their dataset before being tied to any subscription. This ‘try before you buy’ opportunity is great for companies dipping their toes into external location data, and also attests to the data quality of all three vendors. Beyond this, here are the pricing models which Reveal, GroundTruth and PlaceIQ have in place:
We hope we’ve shown you how three of the industry leaders in location data compare – how they’re similar, and what sets them apart. We want to help you navigate the over-crowded world of data commerce and give an independent overview of the vendors powering it.
If you’re still unsure about where to start when it comes to location data, we’re here to match you with a vendor suitable to your needs – get in touch today to book a Datarade demo, and we’ll handpick vendors who are guaranteed to make your journey with location data as efficient and fruitful as possible.
