The Problem: Out-of-Home Ad Attribution
How can Billups accurately measure if a consumer was exposed to an out-of-home ad placement?
The Problem Solver: Billups
Billups is an advertising technology company servicing the out-of-home and digital out-of-home marketplace, translating the physical world into data-driven solutions with the power of the leading outdoor advertising platform. With 18 offices across the US & Canada, Billups is creating audience-centric connections for brands and agencies by building, executing, and measuring intelligent campaigns at scale.
The Backstory: Challenges In Determining Store Visits
The outdoor advertising industry has historically lacked good data upon which to select placements that reach ideal audiences. Without quality data, the industry also struggles to help brands measure campaign effectiveness. Billups pioneered a data-driven solution to the outdoor media placement & measurement problems by using anonymous location data derived from mobile phones.
Billups can determine each anonymized customer’s daily journey, along with which billboards that consumer was exposed to. This is done by mapping the journey each device takes with anonymous GPS data that is then cross-referenced with outdoor inventory locations.
This process works well for digital brands wherein outdoor ad exposure leads to online behavior, measured with online pixels and cookies. But for traditional brick and mortar retailers, measuring outdoor advertising campaign performance remained challenging. In these cases, Billups needed to understand whether outdoor ad exposures led to store visits.
To do this, Billups needed to determine which businesses customers visit during their daily journey. However, using anonymized geolocation data to determine if a consumer entered a specific business (and not the parking lot or the bordering business) is a complex undertaking.
Enter SafeGraph's POI Data & Geofences
Billups used SafeGraph Places to solve their store visit attribution problem. To turn anonymized location data into contextualized store visits, Billups relied heavily on SafeGraph’s POI polygons. These POI building footprints define the exact location, shape, and size of a store.
When joined with GPS data, the precise geofences increase the accuracy of detecting store visits when compared to using store centroids or geocoded street addresses for the store location.
Billups chose SafeGraph Places due to its scale (10 million places globally including almost every location for the top 8,500+brands). This allows Billups to efficiently work with new clients on campaigns without waiting on engineering resources to put together relevant POI & geofence data. Since SafeGraph data is updated monthly, Billups no longer tediously maintains their internal POI dataset to account for store openings and closings.
SafeGraph Places enables Billups to recommend to its clients the ideal spot to place outdoor media based on the types of stores and shoppers that pass by the inventory location, leading to superior results for Billups’ clients.
As human beings, we are social creatures to our core, and need interaction with others. People are typically in three places—their residence, place of employment, and a third location often related to socialization and enjoyment. SafeGraph is a powerful partner to understand human behavior through the lens of data and location intelligence.
Future Plans: Ad-Placements Based on POI Proximity
Billups plans to bring SafeGraph data into its demand-side platform, in order to help clients select ad-placements based on the available inventory’s proximity to different points of interest.
It also plans to use SafeGraph data to derive insights on visitors to large & important POIs such as airports and stadiums. In addition, Billups is now able to select specific POIs within any market and rank OOH placements for the highest exposure to audiences visiting those POIs, making the buys smarter than ever before.
