YP (formerly YellowPages), has announced the release of an audience-tracking product, called Audience Cartography, which provides heat maps of mobile audiences' physical locations. The product uses mobile display ads to drive in store traffic.
“We’ve been able to invest in our platforms to do this at a pretty granular scale,” says Bill Maslyn, YP’s director of digital ad products. “National advertisers still want to know what specific stores are doing, and execute national campaigns on a local level. We can provide an overlay of the search intent signal, getting performance for our advertisers, and enabling them to learn something new about their customers.”
The new product provides interactive click maps, customer store location heat maps and demographic insights, store visit reports, and halo reports to understand the residual effects of campaigns.
The reports can help generate cross-channel insights, too, says Maslyn. If a number of consumers tend to use the same stretch of highway, it would probably be a good investment to buy an out-of-home screen on that stretch.
Maslyn cites one campaign they ran with a national car retailer — which saw twenty times the store visits compared to a control group—as a success that illustrates the power of YPs new product.
After rebranding itself and expanding its capabilities beyond search into digital advertising, YP has been trying to educate businesses about its new proficiencies in the digital ad realm.