PrograMetrix Ad Tech Review: Factual

The Leading Mobile Geofencing & Location Retargeting Provider

There are more mobile phones in the world than there are people… Let that sink in!

Our lives are predicated on the use of mobile devices for all aspects of our day-to-day. Marketers know this and so do advertising technology companies, as new software’s emerge almost monthly to find new ways to reach consumers on their phones.

Over the next 4 years, eMarketer estimates a 42% increase in US mobile location-targeting ad spend, so it is essential that brands and agencies develop a custom, mobile focused targeting strategy.

At PrograMetrix, our preferred mobile location-based targeting provider is Factual.  Founded in 2008 with over $100M+ in capital raised, Factual continues to build incredible mobile technology that the top brands in the world turn to for mobile campaign activation. They believe that “data is the currency for the new economy, and location data is driving smarter digital products, marketing and business decisions.”

Factual breaks down their main solutions into three categories:

1. Data for Marketers – Helping advertisers and agencies throughout the campaign lifecycle from audience insights to targeting and measurement.
2. Data for Products and Apps – Providing product and engineering teams with the tools needed to drive deeper context, greater personalization and enhanced features within their digital consumer products and mobile apps.
3. Data for Analytics – Discover unique business and customer insights to connect mobile movement with real world behavior and places.

Today, we are going to focus on Factual’s programmatic advertising capabilities for marketers and the many applications of their mobile data. Specifically, we are going to dive into their Geopulse product, which is their holistic location-based solution built for programmatic advertising campaigns.

Below we will educate you on the two primary components of the Geopulse product: Proximity and Audience.

Geopulse Proximity

Also known as Geofencing, the Factual Proximity product enables brands, agencies and ad platforms to target mobile users with digital ads based on where they are in real time. Using location-based data from your mobile apps, Geofencing allows precise targeting of individuals while they browse content on their favorite apps, whether at a sporting event or at work. Knowing exactly where a user is at a specific time can give advertisers a unique advantage to engage with consumers on their main device for content on the go.

See also: PrograMetrix Ad Tech Review: The Trade Desk

Here’s how it works:

Let’s say you are a marketer for a quick service restaurant with multiple locations in and around Century Link Field, home of the Seattle Seahawks, and you want to grab the attention of 100,000 fans before, during and after their upcoming home game to drive foot traffic.

Through the Factual platform, a marketing team can simply type in the location of their desired audience, with a micro-targeted radius around each QSR location and automatically have a Geofencing location created. It really is that simple. Now, through your designated demand-side platform (DSP), you can serve targeted ads to engaged sports fans on their mobile devices within a specific location and timeframe.

Here is another example. Let’s say you are a university business school looking to target undergraduate students in the Pacific Northwest in hopes of driving applications for your MBA program.

Knowing that you get applications from a variety of colleges and universities in Washington, Oregon and Idaho, you can specifically target the “Colleges and Universities” category in Factual layered with state level filters to reach your desired audience. This can be more of an evergreen tactic that is deployed during the entire school year to continue to engage with undergraduate university students and promote your MBA program.

Geopulse Audience

While Geofencing allows for targeting mobile-devices in real-time, your campaign scale and reach can be limited by the sheer number of people in your desired location. This is where the Factual Audience product come in to play. At PrograMetrix, we call this Location Retargeting because it enables advertisers to remarket to users based on real world behaviors, so they can reach the right consumers with the right message based on their frequently visited locations.

As mentioned above, one of the main benefits of Location Retargeting is the flexibility and scale of the data. You can tell a lot about a consumer based on their frequently visited locations, chains, or categories of businesses. Through Factual, you can easily build ready to target audiences based on a variety of location categories that someone visits. For example, you can target “In-Market Auto Buyers” based off of data from individuals who have recently visited automotive dealerships.

For a more custom approach, marketing teams can use the Audience Designer tool to build custom audience profiles from mobile device IDs that previously visited a specific location during a set time frame.

See also: PrograMetrix Ad Tech Review: LiveRamp

For example, let’s say you are an innovative technology startup company and you introduced your product to the world for the first time at CES (Consumer Electronics Show) in Las Vegas. You don’t want to lose steam from that expensive sponsorship deal you signed with CES but can’t quite figure out how to continue to engage with the event attendees after the show.

With Factual, plug in the location, set your specific date range for the event, and now you have collected all of the mobile device IDs from the event to target in a subsequent campaign.

On a monthly basis, we execute the above example for our digital corporate sponsorship clients. When you have a finite amount of time for sponsorship activation at a sporting event, conference or music festival, you really don’t want your brand engagement to end when the event does. Collect the mobile device IDs using Factual and continue your online activation when the other competing brand connections taper off.

See also: The Key to an Effective B2B Programmatic ABM Advertising Strategy

Once we target the mobile devices of attendees, we can extend our reach to those engaged users by enabling we call Cross-Device Targeting to reach other connected devices at users’ home or workplace. Now, we can develop engaging sponsorship campaigns that effectively engage audiences across Mobile, Social, Video, Audio, and Connected TV channels and devices.

Final Thoughts on Factual

The growth of mobile advertising is only going to continue, making it essential for brand marketers to include location-based technology, like Factual, into your ad tech stack. The use of mobile data can be a linchpin in your digital strategy and Factual’s unique data set and targeting tactics can provide a more granular approach to mobile advertising.

If you need to elevate your location-based targeting strategy with Factual or want to learn more about the PrograMetrix mobile advertising capabilities, click here.