When consumers visit physical stores, the likelihood that they will complete a purchase shoots up, especially in comparison to the likelihood they will make a purchase after visiting a digital site. “Visits lead to sales,” was the message of Hongzhe Sun of GroundTruth, one of the sponsors of Street Fight Summit in New York Wednesday.
GroundTruth is a location technology platform that tracks customers by location and executes targeted advertising campaigns based on consumer behavior, all in the goal of driving customers to make visits to physical retail locations. “We see over 18 billion requests comprising a mobile GPS signal every day,” Sun said. The company uses that data to serve over 1 billion ads every day.
GroundTruth uses location tracking to serve ads because offline visits show a stronger sign of intent, Sun said. “We know that people who search for gyms and people who actually go to the gym regularly are very different,” he said. When the company locates a user who actually goes to a gym, the likelihood they regularly go to a gym is much higher than if the person had been located through an online search.