Factual FAQs

TARGET REAL-TIME LOCATION

Reach mobile device users based on where they are in real time, withFactual Proximity.

Factual Proximity allows you to target any sets of places in Factuals Global Places data by selecting attributes such as geography, category, and brand. Availableattributes include:

Place name

Category

Chain

Postcode, City, State/province, Country

US DMA or MSA

US Congressional Districts

Household Income (US only)

Use Factuals visual, web-based tool the Proximity Designer to easily design and deploy campaigns.

For highly precise targeting, Factual also provides polygon geofences for places such as airports, shopping malls, retail brands, and others.

IT'S A MOBILE-FIRST WORLD

We now live in a mobile-first world. U.S. smartphone penetration is at 81%, and global smartphone sales are at an all-time high as internet adoption continues to grow in emerging markets. There will be an estimated 11.6 billion mobile-connected devices by 2021.

Consumers spend 5 hours per day on their mobile devicesmore than any other screen and a 69% increase year-over-year.

THE APP IS KING

The majority of consumers' mobile usage is in-app: the average user spends 16x more time on top apps than they do on top mobile websites.

The massive growth in mobileand mobile appadoption provides a lot of data that's valuable for marketers. Chief among these is location...

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MOBILE APPS AND LOCATION

Apps are able to providea location signal that represents a mobile device users movement in the physical world.

This location signal is actionable almost immediately, and it is associated with a relatively persistent identifierthe Device IDthat is not classified as personally identifiable information (PII). This means marketers can leverage location data while still respecting consumer privacy.

Thanks to the popularity of location basedservices, these location signals are available at scale...

90% OF CONSUMERS USE LOCATION BASED SERVICES

Around 90% of all smartphone owners use location based services. In fact, the most common activity among smartphone owners islocation specific search.

LOCATION DATA FOR MODERN MARKETING

Location data provides marketers a scalable means to target consumers based on their real world behavior. It can also help yield closed-loop measurement and unprecedentedcustomer understanding.

Read on to learn more.

to learn how Factual's product suite can help you plan, execute, and measure high-performing marketing campaigns.

MARKETERS HAVE EMBRACED LOCATION TARGETING

In the world of location data, targeting is the low-hanging fruit. The marketers holy grail is to reach the right consumers at the right place and the right time. Location data checks all those boxesand more.

That's why over 81% of marketers planned to use location data to target in 2017.

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It is expected that location targeting tactics willmake up nearlyhalf of mobile ad spend by 2021.

WHAT IS LOCATION TARGETING?

Mobile location targeting allows us topreciselytarget theright peopleat theright time. But what does mobile location targeting mean, exactly?

There are two broad types of mobile location targeting:

Audience Targeting: targeting ads based on data about where people have been.

Geofencing: targeting ads based on data telling us where people are right now.

GEOFENCING

Location data can be used to create different types of "geofences" or boundaries designating the targeted area. This allows marketers to reach consumers in real time, based on where they are located at that exact moment. The two most common geofencing approaches are:

Point Radius Geofencing, in which you specify a desired radius around a specific point of interest (e.g., a business location).

Polygon Geofencing, in which you specifymultiple points (or draw a polygon) to define the perimeter of a geofence.

Click here to learn how Factual Proximity can help you reach mobile device users based on where they are in real time

AUDIENCE TARGETING

Location data can be used for audience targeting in multiple ways. Here are three common approaches to using location data to identify the right people to target for a specific campaign:

Identify people who have been to a specific place.

Understand who people are, based on the places they visit over time (aka geoaudience profiling).

Understand peoples behavioral patterns (aka geobehavioral ad targeting).

1) Target Visitors to Specific Places

Location data can be used to target ads to consumers who have visited specific placessuch as businesses, chains, or points of interest. For example, marketers often wish to target their own brick-and-mortar locations to upsell or re-engage existing customers, or conquest competitors' customers by targeting competitors' locations. Similarly, brands may wish to target points-of-interest related to a particular campaign, such as dog parks when promoting a dog food brand.

2) Creating Audience Profiles

By analyzing device visitation rates to specific locations over time, we can gain insight into the type of person using the device. This allows us to create unique geoinformed audience profiles for ad targeting. For example,if we see that a single device has visited multiple airports and hotels during the work week, week after week, we can infer that this person is a business traveler. This is sometimes referred to as geoaudience profiling.

3) Understanding Real World Behavioral Patterns

We can also analyze device location data collected over time, in order to gain insight into where devices appear frequently and better understand consumers behavioral patterns. This can be used to change a habitual behavior by targeting ads to devices at specific times of day. For example, if you knowthat a user visits their local coffee shop at 8am every morning, you can serve them an ad at precisely the right time to encourage them to visit a different coffee shop. This is sometimes referred to as geobehavioral ad targeting.

Click here to learn how Factual Audience suite can help you target ads to groups of people based on how they behave in the real world.

Login andto view campaign strategies and tactics for specific use cases and verticals from our location strategy experts. Don't have a login? Email [email protected] to gain access to all Knowledge Base articles.

ONLINE CONVERSIONS ARE ONLY HALF OF THE STORY

If youre only considering online activity,you'vegot an incomplete understanding of your customers journey.

Acc. to the Census Bureau, brick-and-mortar sales accounted for over 92 percent of retail sales in 2016.

Stores remain consumers preferred shopping channel for many goods. Studies have found that many consumers prefer shopping in brick-and-mortar stores for a wide variety of products including household goods, home furnishings, apparel, and beauty.

Over half of millennials (especially younger ones) prefer shopping in physical stores to shopping online.

Real world visits to physical locations are the only true conversion metric for most service-based businesses (including restaurants and QSR).

Additionally, arecent Yahoo! Study with a national apparel retailer found that 84 percent of the sales increase fromonline adscame from offline sales.

In other words, if offline sales are not considered, your online spend is significantly devalued.

FACTUAL DATA FOR MEASUREMENT CAN HELP YOU CLOSE THE LOOP

Geopulse Data For Measurement can help you close the loop by integrating in-store visitation data into your campaign performance metrics, using the best location data available.

Measure The Full Impact Of Your Ad Spend

Factual has partnered with best-in-class attribution solutionsto quantify the full impact of your cross-channel media campaigns and help you optimize accordingly.

Achieve cross-device and cross-channel measurement: understand the impact of any media you are tracking via our measurement partners (including DoubleClickand Viant) whether or not your media buy includesFactual targeting.

Gain a more complete understanding of your customers behavior.

Identify insights to influence and optimize your marketing and advertising.You can even measure visits to individual stores.

Prove campaign success without relying on proxy metrics.

Effectively measure the long-term impact of your campaigns to show a clear return on investment.

Location Data You Can Trust

Accuracy and precision are critical when location data is used for measurement purposes. Factuals Data for Measurement provides real-world visitation data you can trust powered by our proprietary technology and first-party data assets.

Unmatched Flexibility and Choice

Factuals Data for Measurement provides a highly-customizable, neutral data layer for measurement not bound to specific media, targeting, or attribution providers.

Customize the list of your specific locations that represent an offline conversionto align with your specific campaign objectives.

Choose the level of reporting granularity that best aligns with your organizations resources and campaign needs. Factual can deliver raw data feeds, fully packaged insights reports, and everything in-between.

Choose the attribution solution you prefer, according to your needs and workflow.

White-Glove Service

Factuals team of location data experts will help you throughout the process, working directly with you to help ensure your campaign measurement initiative is set up for success.

Contact [email protected] to learn more!

Leverage real-world observations to power your audience targeting strategy, with Factual Insights.

TAKE THE GUESSWORK OUT OF HOW TO REACH YOUR AUDIENCEFactual Insights provides an in-depth analysis of your target audience and how they behave in the real world. Analyze audience attributes like:

Top Categories Visited

Top Chains Visited

Demographic Characteristics

Income Distribution

Time of Day and Week Analysis

Heat Map Analysis

BASED ON REAL WORLD VISITSThere are no hypotheticals with Factual Insights. Our analysis is not survey or panel based so we account for the inherent bias that happens with those approaches.

BUILT OFF LOCATION DATA YOU CAN TRUSTFactual Insights is built off of our comprehensive Global Places data that powers top mobile apps like Facebook, Apple, and Uber. Our proprietary data sets cover over 20MM+ US places and determine device visits from 3 Trillion observations to provide actionable insights for advertisers.

OUR LOCATION EXPERT DO THE ANALYSIS FOR YOUNo need to weed through spreadsheets of data, our Strategy Team provides location-based insights to inform your future marketing strategy.

TAKE A DEEP DIVE INTO THE BEHAVIOR OF YOUR BEST CUSTOMERSFactuals Location Strategy team takes the behaviors of your target audience and provides a customized media recommendation for more efficient and effective media campaigns.

Contact our Location Strategy Teamat [email protected] to learn more.

A single data point is not enough to determine if a person is actually at a place (or if they are walking or driving by that place). Factual takes a holistic view of location and looks at additional data signals to give more context to where a user actually is.

Our Place Attachment technology considers the lat/long as well as multiple additional data signals to infer context and determine if a user is at a specific place.

Examples of the data signals considered include:

Popularity of a place

Nearby intersections

Whether the place is open or closed

Business category density in the surrounding area

Aggregate user behavior

Home / Work Areas of Activity

Distance from other places

Factual's Place Attachment software analyzes these signals in order to correctly attribute users to the appropriate place.

PLACE ATTACHMENT ENABLES CORRECT PLACE ATTRIBUTION

Through internal testing, we've found that Factuals proprietary Place Attachment technology is 33% more accurate than simple geofencing and 25% more accurate than point-in-polygon at determining where users really are.

EXAMPLES OF THE MULTIPLE DATA SIGNALS CONSIDERED

Place Attachment technology analyzes the most popular locations (through social check-ins like Facebook) to inform place attribution.

If we see a device at a location regularly during work hours, well categorize that as a work location, and use this information (alongside time of day and day of week) to inform place attribution.

We consider a users aggregate behavior to determine the most likely place attribution. If we know a user regularly visits coffee shops and not bars, this data will inform our place attribution.

TARGET REAL WORLD BEHAVIOR

Factual Audience lets you target ads to groups of people based on how they behave in the real world.

Factualanalyzes mobile device users location histories to understand their brand affinity, real world behavioral patterns, and demographic characteristicsso you can reach the right consumers, with location data you can trust.

Design or select audiences to target hundreds of nuanced behaviors (based on trillions of real world observations), including:

Visits to specific place, chains, or categories of businesses

Recency and frequency of visits

Patterns of behavior (e.g., drives to work)

Time of day and day of week

Factual Audience offers flexible targeting optionsfrom fully custom to completely turnkey.

You can choose to design your own highly-customized Audiences based on nuanced behaviors using Factuals self-service, web-based Geopulse Audience Designer tool.

Or select from Factual Audiencesa collection of ready-to-use audiences designed by our location experts.

Geopulse Audiences are organized into four top-level categories:

Brand Shopper segments describe mobile device users based on real-world visits to specific, branded locations.

Place Category Visitor segments describe mobile device users based on the types of places they visit. These segments describe users real-world visits to categories of businesses and points of interest.

Behavioral segments describe mobile device users based on their real-world behavioral patterns.

Demographic segmentsdescribe mobile device users based on their age, gender, parental status, and household income.(Available in the US only.)

Get started designing Factual Audiences or Proximity sets in two simple steps:

Step 1) Sign up for a new account by visiting https://factual.com/users/register. Input your name, email address, company name, and desired password.

Factual Audience

Step 2) Email us at [email protected] (using the email you used to sign up online) to let us know you'd like to get started with Geopulse.

Factual will provision your account, and send you an email to confirm you can begin designing campaigns.

Got your account? Get started with Factual Proximity or immediately.

Factual offers two online, self-service dashboards for you to create your own Audience and/or Proximitytargetingsegments (or "designs"): the Factual Audience Designer, and the Factual ProximityDesigner.

They are accessible at the following urls, afterlogin:

Factual Audience Designer: https://gp.factual.com/geopulse/audience/designer

Factual ProximityDesigner: https://gp.factual.com/geopulse/proximity/designer

This section will help you get started using these tools to create customized designs for targeting.

Ready to get started? Create a Factual Account.

Remember: If you'd rather not create your own designs, you can always reach out to [email protected] to request custom audience & proximity designs, tailored to your unique campaign KPIs.

LOCATION DATA FOR MODERN MARKETING

Marketers, advertisers, and agencies can utilize location data to better understand customers, build highly-targeted audiences and measure campaign effectiveness.

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DRIVE UNIQUE CUSTOMER INSIGHTS

Enable smarter, data-driven decision-making and gain deeper customer insights by using location data to analyze consumer behaviors, track footfall, build profiles for specific geographic areas, and more.

BUILD TARGETED AUDIENCES

Brands and agencies use location data to build highly targeted audiences based on historical patterns or real-time behaviors to target new customers, engage existing customers, influence competitors consumers, and more.

MEASURE CAMPAIGN EFFECTIVENESS

With quality location data, marketers can connect online marketing campaigns to offline results for closed-loop measurement and cross-channel attribution.

to learn how Factual's product suite can help you plan, execute, and measure high-performing marketing campaigns.

There are 2 key dataingredients for location targeting:User Location Data andPlaces Data.

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These two types of data must be accurate, and they must be correctlymatched. This is not trivial. User location data is often inaccurate, places data is often incomplete or outdated, and the matching process is complicated.

USER LOCATION DATA

User geolocation data usually takes the form ofthe lat/long coordinatesof the mobile device. These are captured in real-time as the user moves throughout the world.

However, there are many reasons a lat/long may not be sufficiently precise or accurate for effective targeting. These reasons include: invalid coordinates, coordinate truncation, and out of bounds coordinates.

But even accurate lat/long coordinates are meaningless without context...

PLACES DATA

Lat/long coordinates, in and of themselves, are not incredibly helpful for most targeting needs. What we really need to know is: What place (business or point of interest) is the user actually at?

Places datameaning accuratedata about businesses or points of interestallows us to identifythe places that currently exist at specific lat/longcoordinates. But quality places data must include more than a name and a lat/long. Information like the place category, hours of operation, and attributes about the neighborhood or business district are necessary to providereal context.

Additionally,qualityplaces data must be refreshed constantly, because businesses open and close frequently.

PLACE ATTRIBUTION

For effective location targeting, these two ingredients (user location and place) must be accurately matched. That is, the user's location must be attributed to the correct place.This requires more than a single data point.

Factual has developed proprietary data assets and technologies to tackle these challenges. to learn howFactual ensures quality.

Accurate targeting or offline conversions measurement cannot be hadunless you have a world-class places database. Factuals proprietary Global Places data provides the context needed to turn lat/long coordinates into meaningful place visit data.

Factual Global Places data includes~100 million businesses and points of interest (POI) globally, and is updated in real-time from millions of data sourcesensuring fresh, inclusive, and accurate coverage of the worlds brick-and-mortar businesses and local, regional, and national landmarks.

Our data is trusted and licensed by companies including Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Snapchat, American Express, JPMC and more.

THE BEST PLACES DATA

Factual sources its place data from millions of resources across the web, trusted partners, government sources, and user contributions. Our entire Global Places dataset is created from over two billion references to businesses, landmarks, and POI across over 5 million unique sources.

The Factual Data Stack distills these billions of points into our canonical dataset. It is roughly a five-step process:

1. Aggregation:The data is collected by, or provided to, Factual in both batch and real-time, and stored in its original raw format. We are constantly adding new data sources, and always retain the raw data so we can extract additional data later with improved rules and learnings.

2. Extraction, Cleaning & Validation: Core attributes are extracted using an engine containing over ten thousand curated rules, applied per-attribute-per-country, to transform messy raw data into structured normalized data.

3. Resolving:Factuals Resolve Engine takes the billions of cleaned and validated input records and identifies inputs that represent the same place, collating the records into optimal clusters; each cluster forms the basis of our 100 million place entities.

4. Summarizing & Materializing:The process of summarization determines the most factually correct value for each attribute of a place, derived from a set of clustered inputs. Truth is determined by assigning an attribute specific trust weighting to each of our data sources. These trust weightings are continuously updated through heuristics and Machine Learning as we learn more about our data sources. Summarized data is then materialized as a data release, and made available via download.

5. Quality Assurance:Our internal data quality metrics measure data quality across 22 key metrics, which measure both the accuracy and comprehensiveness of our data.

OUR PLACES DATA IS UPDATED CONTINUOUSLY

Businesses open and close frequently. Factual's Global Places data is updated in real-time, from millions of data sources, ensuring fresh, inclusive, and accurate coverage of the worlds brick-and-mortar businesses and local, regional, and national landmarks.

OUR PLACES DATA IS MORE THAN A POINT ON A MAP

Factual provides all categorical information, hours of operation, star ratings, demographics about the people who visited, and nearby events.

Targeting and Measurement initiatives are only as good the data they're based on...

Factual provides the best mobile location data, so you avoid wasting dollars sending ads to the wrong people or making decisions based on inaccurate information.

How? Through a complex stack of proprietary data and technology.

Factual enables best-in-class location based targeting and measurement by observing and analyzing the intersection of Factual's Global Places data and geo-location data, which is continually validated against rigorous criteria. Our Place Attachment technology thenassigns mobile device users to the appropriate place, using multiple data signals. Finally,Observation Graph indexes our observations of real world behavior to enable unprecedented user understanding.

Quality location targeting and measurement requires avalid and precise location signal. Factuals Location Validation Stack makes accuracy and precision possible.

DIVERSE GEOLOCATION DATA SOURCES

Factual partners with publishers, apps, and exchanges to acquire geolocation data. Factual gets its geolocation data in several ways, including ad impression data provided by Factual's advertising partners (e.g., ad exchanges, ad networks, publishers, DMPs), from mobile applications through server-side transfers and Factual's SDK, from other mobile app service providers who have their own SDKs, and from data aggregators.

However, there are many reasons a lat/long may not be sufficiently precise or accurate for effective targeting. These reasons include: invalid coordinates, coordinate truncation, and out of bounds coordinates.Additionally, Factual has identified hundreds of thousands of blacklisted coordinates, as well as blacklisted Device IDs and blacklisted apps.

For this reason, all geolocation data is first passed to Factuals Location Validation Stack, which validates mobile location data against rigorous criteria in order to remove invalid and imprecise lat/longs.

PROPRIETARY LOCATION VALIDATION PROCESS

Factuals Location Validation Stack is proprietary software that validates all device location data to help ensure you are using valid lat/longs for your campaigns... at no additional fee.

https://www.factual.com/technology/ads/location-validation-stack

This process ultimately discards ~70% of the potential location data points which do not meet our accuracy standards.

For more information on Factuals Location Validation Stack, please visit:

ONLINE CONVERSIONS ARE ONLY HALF OF THE STORY

While people use mobile in 45% of all shopping journeys, the majority of sales still happen in brick-and-mortar businesses. In fact, more than 90% of retail sales take place in-store.

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And stores remain consumers preferred shopping channel for many goods and most services...

Stores are alsopreferredby many consumers. Over half of millennials (especially younger ones, ages 20-23) prefer shopping in physical stores to shopping online.

If youre only considering online activity,you'vegot an incomplete understanding of your customers journey.

Additionally, over 80 percent of online ad effect is on offline sales. A recent Yahoo! Study with a national apparel retailer found that 84 percent of the sales increase fromonline adscame from offline sales.

In other words, if offline sales are not considered, your online spend issignificantlydevalued.

OFFLINE CONVERSIONS HELP CLOSE THE LOOP

Closed-loop measurement helps you understand the full value of your media investment and optimize accordingly.

Gain a more complete understanding of your customers behavior.

Identify insights to influence and optimize your marketing and advertising.

Effectively measure the long-term impact of campaigns to show a clear return on investment.

That's why marketers rely on location data for holistic measurement.

to learn how Factual's Geopulse Data for Measurement can help you capitalize on the power of high-quality location to improve your measurement initiatives.

Sources (in order of appearance):Facebook IQ, February 2016; U.S. Census Bureau, Q1 2016; Retail Dive Consumer Survey, fielded by Google Survey;The Millennial Shopping Report, CouponFollow, Summer 2017; BIA/Kelsey; eMarketer, Location Intelligence, H2 2016

DATA QUALITY IS A TOP CONCERN

Despite ongoing growth in location data usage, marketers question the quality of location data. In fact, the MMA reports that data quality and transparency are marketers' top concerns about mobile location data.

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Smart marketers have good reason to be concerned...

DATA QUALITY VARIES

The effectiveness of location basedmarketing initiatives is directly correlated with the quality of the underlying location data.

Location Data may appearstraightforward on first blush: two numbers longitude and latitude combine as a coordinate to identify an unambiguous point on the earths surface: X marks the spot, unequivocally. But nothing could be further from the truth...

Location data quality varies significantly depending on the source.

There are 2 key dataingredients for location targeting:User Location DataandPlaces Data. Both can prove problematic...

Read on to learn more.

Factual has developed proprietary data assets and technologies to tackle these challenges. to learn howFactual ensures quality.