Businesses are getting more innovative in carrying out their services and one of the tools that can help them understand about their potential customer behaviour and the market industry in general is using GPS and location data for their analytics needs. Location data collection is one of the many options of a digital marketer in order to track down their customer locations and activities. The popularity of mobile marketing campaigns further makes the integration of GPS and location data for analytics more important.
Digital marketers who want to monitor the location of their customers and to understand the length of time they spend for visiting their website as well as the various locations they travel can improve their analytics strategies of improving the way their website interact and engage their potential customers. The use of global positioning services (GPS) data provide a more efficient means of automating the process of gathering location based data to help improve their digital marketing campaigns. As a matter of fact, GPS data contains a wealth of information regarding a customer's shopping activity, behaviour and preferences that help businesses in making wiser marketing decisions.
Leveraging on GPS and Location Data
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Location based marketing helps to improve your insights about the local market and the purchasing behaviour of your target customers. There are various aspects of the GPS data gathering process that digital marketers use to leverage to obtain better local marketing campaigns such as the following:
- Finding out about the customer's location points
This helps a digital marketer understand where their target customer usually spends most of their time based on various location points. By using this location data you can determine whether the customer is more likely to spend time at home, office, schools and even on coffee shops. This GPS data can be used as a marketing insight on how a business can influence their customer buying behaviour based on their lifestyle and movements.
- Identifying travel time and inactivity
GPS and location data provides some predictive behaviour of a customer involving their lifestyle and the time of day where they tend to be active. This can be a marketing insight that helps marketers predict customer behaviours and activity.
- Obtain marketing insights based on the interaction of the customer to their travel paths
By analyzing the customer's travel path, marketers will know what kind of business establishments the target customer passes by which is likely to be become familiar to them and will likely influence their purchasing behaviour. It can also be inferred based on the location points that the customer frequently visits about their preferences, interests and hobbies. For instance, a customer that usually frequents a visit to a boutique is likely to be interested to shop for clothes while those who like to drop by a bookstore like to purchase books. These types of location data and GPS information are very useful for digital marketers in planning for their search engine optimization, social media marketing and internet marketing campaigns.
Using location data in Google Analytics
If your business is targeting the local market, using Google Analytics can help you optimize the use and analysis of the available GPS and location data for your business. The platform has a location report that is essentially useful in optimizing local marketing strategies of a digital marketer. The Google Analytics has the ability to locate your customers across the globe for international businesses and within the local areas for local marketers. It helps to understand however that the Google Analytics location service feature is highly dependent upon the IP address of the user's so there is a possibility that the location target may not be accurate. However, most devices provide a location service feature that automatically detects the location of the user.
You can use the Google Analytics GPS and location data in many ways:
1. Clicking through the Google map.
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The map is a good visual aid in helping you find the most frequently visited places of your customers. As you hover the mouse on a specific area in the map it will reveal the name of the country or local places and the number of the IP addresses that visited your website. You will instantly know how popular your website is on that location.
2. Clicking through the report links.
Report links are available which appear on the name of the country/place that you click on. You will find detailed reports that are broken down into segments. Use the data to find out whether your business is popular or enjoys a good conversion rate from your target local or international customers.
3. Obtain reports by location segments and filters.
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The Google Analytics provides specific location data to obtain filtered and segmented reports. You can break down the data according to your preferred criteria and selected data. You can compare data from various countries/locations by going to the Advanced Segments tab and add the custom segment that you want to appear based on the country or territory and locations based on regions, cities or metropolitan. You will find segmented reports about the traffic of your website within a particular location including content reports that will indicate how your content is engaging its viewers based on a particular location. This part of the analytics provides you location data services that help to identify the behaviour of your customers based on the keyword used from a specific device.
4. Using location data to optimize your Adwords campaigns
Digital marketers are extensive using Adwords for their marketing campaigns and location data from Google Analytics provides them a powerful marketing tool to optimize their campaign ads within a specific location. The tagging feature from the Analytics allows the Remarketing of cookies that you can use in targeting relevant ads for Adwords based on your customer locations. You can use this strategy in implementing location based marketing campaigns such as promoting local sales, opening a new product to sell, local events and delivery services within a particular location.
A word of caution
Collecting data from GPS is usually bound to adhere to the privacy law in many countries. You can embark in a more productive and legal means of GPS and location data collection process by obtaining the consent of your customers. How to make them opt in to your offer? It is as simple as giving good reasons to do so. You can accomplish this by offering them discounts for your products or services or some freebies and takeaways to make them sign up for this undertaking.