• by Steve Smith  @popeyesm, August 15, 2013

Location analytics firm Placed says it can tell you whether that ad campaign really did drive people to your retail location. A product the company rolled out this week, Placed Attribution, will use the company’s panel of 100,000 opted-in users whose behaviors the company tracks as they move in and out of over 100 million discrete locations a day.

Using the detailed metrics it received from the opt-in panel, Placed is partnering with launch partner local ad network xAd to integrate with a mobile campaign. The system will know which of the opted-in devices have been exposed to an ad in a campaign and then track whether that user entered the advertised location. It will measure store visits and whether they are attributable to ad impressions, comparison of campaign effect against a baseline of un-exposed users (lift), and further detail about the demographics and locations of people who did respond to the ad with offline behaviors.

Placed will report back to advertisers a projection of how many store visits are attributable to a campaign over the previous week, the cost of attaining each store visit as well as the number of impressions overall required to produce a visit. Audience demographics include income, ethnicity, education, age and more. The platform can also determine how long it took a person to act on the ad exposure, from same day to 2 weeks out.

Placed says it is already working with some of the largest retailers and quick-service restaurants using the product.

Placed’s core product, on which Placed Attribution is based, is Placed insights, which uses its 100,000-person panel to map activity in locations and understand which groups have the highest affinity to visit which retailer.  

Solving the puzzle of mobile advertising effectiveness and attribution appears to be a top priority in the mobile marketing industry this year. In recent weeks the ad tech provider 4Info rolled out a partnership with data service powerhouse Acxiom that allows retailers to retarget their own customer database via mobile ads. In 4Info’s approach, the ads can be geotargeted to those customers’ households, which in turn may be tied back to the marketer’s record of that household’s purchasing of the product.