The location based marketing industry will reach $55 billion over next 3 years, yet up to 90% of location signal data today is flawed.  Yes, I said flawed. 

Why is that?  Most location signals from mobile devices can be attributed to false signals, fraud, waste, abuse and in many cases are just nonsensical.  Any way you measure it, location signals powering this enormous growth, are challenged. 

If you’re frustrated with the quality of location signals you’re using, its ok - 90% of what Facebook or Google think they know about me is wrong too.

This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t utilize location signals at all. In fact, there’s gold in them there hills. Getting to that gold has huge implications for marketers—eliminating vast amounts of wasted media spend and driving up conversions and consumer satisfaction along the way.  

We need a way to eliminate the noise from location signals; separate wheat from chaff, good eggs from bad. In the immortal words of Michael Jackson, “One bad apple don’t spoil the whole bunch girl.” But in location based marketing’s case, it’s more like almost 9 bad apples out of 10…

So, how do we separate the gold from the lead?

Well Gravy has spent the last five years doing just this and let me say – it ain’t easy.  It starts with a fundamental understanding of geospatial dynamics. Or to take it down to a campfire level – it’s about verifying where consumers actually go and what’s going on where they go, to create contextual intelligence on their lifestyles, wants and needs.

But utilizing the dizzying volume of location signals to do this just isn’t cutting it. In our company, we utilize a rigorous four-step Location Signal Verification process, starting with millions of mobile devices and billions of raw location signals. From there, we filter out the noise, to get to conclusive, actionable consumer intelligence.

The result?  On average, over 85% of the location signals we process are eliminated. 

Now, you may be thinking, “Wow, only 15% left?  That’s a pretty small scale to act on.”  Not so.  When you consider that signals are coming off of over 220 million devices in the U.S., and the wearables market continues to grow along with IoT, the scale becomes self-evident. And as device usage continues over time the scale continues to grow. 

Regardless, location signal verification eliminates huge amounts of irrelevant media spend and drives up engagement and conversions—all essential for marketers.  So don’t be afraid of the lions, tigers and bears—they can quickly and permanently be banished, putting you on the yellow brick road to location based marketing success.