Any business needs to optimize its website for conversions. It doesn’t matter what the goal is: newsletter subscribers, advertising impressions, increased sales, or anything else. Everything you do with your website in this ever-changing digital world will have a significant impact on your business.
Looking at data is necessary when optimizing a website. As with any other experiment, you change and modify your site and then let the traffic tell you what you need to know. This information can provide intelligence and insight into your customers and how they react to your company. Finally, this data is so important that it should serve as the foundation for all of your business decisions.
But where does location data fit into this? Your customers vary in age, gender, and income. Importantly, people will visit your site from all over the world. They’ll speak different languages, use different currencies, and live in various climates. So, even if you have a.com website, you may find that visitors from all over the world are accessing it.
With that said, how do you ensure that you’re catering to your target audience? Especially when your audience varies so widely. The answer is in location data, specifically geo-tracking and targeting.
Basics of Location Data
- Location data frequently means GPS data.
- It is collected through smartphones and other devices.
- Location data is analyzed using spatial analytics tools.
Geospatial technology and location intelligence cover a wide range of the business landscape, but the entire ecosystem is based on one thing: an endless supply of high-quality location data. Luckily, the world’s location data reserves are full. Certain types of data are even open source. Location data has a natural overlap with many other types of big data. When one is combined with the other, the result is a stream of real-world insights that inform investment decisions, detect change earlier, and quantify its effects.
What is location data and how is it collected?
Location data is the digital footprint left by people and objects moving in the physical world. As a landline’s IP address can be used to determine physical location, common mobile devices can gather location data in the form of GPS signals. In legitimate markets, users’ location data is collected with their consent, aggregated, and anonymized. Only in this distilled form can location data be used to its full commercial potential.
Mobile GPS pings are used to collect location data, which is then aggregated and contextualized into meaningful insights such as how many people visited a location and for how long (foot traffic data), your visitors’ work and home locations (trade area data), where else your customers shop (cross-visitation data), and where people are moving to and from (migration pattern data).
Where does Location data come from?
Mobile phones, beacons, Wi-Fi, raster data (think satellite images), connected vehicles, and other remote sensing devices that track people and things are common sources of location data. Once collected and processed, this data can be examined using spatial analytics tools. Several such options exist, the most powerful of which are secure platforms designed for large, first-party data owners like telecommunications companies.
Benefits of Location Data
Location data is useful for:
- Detecting and measuring change.
- Informing Investment Decisions.
- Enhancing competitive intelligence and developing new products and markets.
Location data in business has the potential to significantly improve strategic decision-making, customer targeting, and operational efficiency. Unlike static data sets, which are only reviewed once a quarter during KPI analysis, location data is frequently based on mobile location data and geolocation technologies such as GPS data, which can provide enormous insights into customer behavior, departmental successes (or failures), and competitive opportunities. The only question teams still have is how to activate it.
Conclusion
Location data providers like LocationsCloud use standard procedures to collect large datasets based on zip codes. Working with niche organizations is often a good idea because it can save you time and money. With a structured database, brands can focus on getting faster results when making strategic business decisions. This information is valuable across domains for a variety of reasons. In real estate, it is used to assess properties and nearby developments. In retail, it is used to analyze store locations and marketing strategies based on targeted demographics using traffic and visit attribution analysis. It is frequently used by government bodies for urban planning and logistics to optimize mobility.
