Full Transcript of Think Fresh - Episode 4
00;00;00;00 – 00;00;20;16
RYAN
We’re doing this. All right.
JEN
Hello and welcome to this. Where are you talking? Oh my God. All right, we’ll try this again. Ryan, are you settled?
RYAN
Settled.
00;00;20;18 – 00;00;41;06
JEN
Okay. Hello, and welcome to Think Fresh, a podcast brought to you by de Novo Marketing’s Collective Creative. Coming to you from our Ideas Institute and here to talk about all things marketing. Insights on new trends, innovative ideas and marketing tools you can use in your day to day life, and whatever else we deem relevant. I’m Jen Neumann, de novo CEO and your host.
00;00;41;08 – 00;01;05;15
RYAN
And I’m Ryan Shenefelt, account manager, innovation and education lead and resident nosy eavesdropper, always looking to push the envelope.
JEN
He is indeed very, very nosy.
RYAN
Today, we’re going to talk about customer analytics tools, specifically Placer.ai. Today’s episode is a solo cast. Jen is not with us today, but we are being joined by two fellow deNovians. Today we have Ally Machalan and Julian Klepach.
00;01;05;15 – 00;01;27;14
RYAN
Welcome to Think Fresh friends! For the people listening, can you tell us a little bit more about your roles at de Novo?
ALLY
Thanks. Ryan. This is Ally Machala. I am the digital strategist here at de Novo. So, spending a lot of my time in paid campaigns and helping clients, put together strategies that get results.
00;01;27;14 – 00;01;49;10
RYAN
Awesome, awesome. Julian, what about you?
JULIAN
Well, thank you for introducing me, Ryan. I’m the digital coordinator here at de Novo. You could call me Ally’s right hand man. but I also do a lot of organic social media and digital marketing as well.
RYAN
And, Julian, you you have been known as our resident Gen Z.
JULIAN
Yes.
00;01;49;14 – 00;02;11;03
RYAN
Thank you for thank you for keeping us fresh. So today we’re going to be talking about location analysis specifically for our customers or your competition’s customers. Ally, Julian, can you tell me a little bit more about like what location analysis is and why it’s important for us?
JULIAN
So location analytics help you know more about the people who are actually coming and going
into and from a given location, which in turn will help us better target our advertising campaigns without having to, let’s say, manually survey all of the people who come into a store or coming to, an event. So before digital advertising, everything was dependent on location and those physical visits. And that’s still just as important. But now we have a few more tools to work with. When you make advertising campaigns, especially digital ones, a lot of the time these days you are kind of guessing.
00;02;40;13 – 00;03;04;27
JULIAN
These are the type of people that we need to reach. Something like location analytics takes that guesswork out.
RYAN
Yeah. So digital advertising now, we know it’s really reliant on cookies and determining what you’re searching for, things you search for in the past… kind of building a profile around your audience. So we have access to all of that. But it doesn’t necessarily say how many people are coming into your location.
00;03;04;29 – 00;03;22;14
RYAN
The only way to get that in the past has been like door counters or physically counting how many people are at an event, or how many people are in your store, in your shop. Or even in your community at a given time. But with this tool, it allows us to actually track that in as real of time as possible.
00;03;22;16 – 00;03;50;27
ALLY
Essentially, it tells you very specifically where your people are coming from. So location wise, but it also give us information on demographics, similar interests and just all kinds of information that we can then use to implement better targeting, using contextual targeting, like what are their favorite places? Where do they go after they visit your store?
00;03;50;29 – 00;04;18;26
ALLY
What part of the city or state, or neighborhood, even are they living in?
RYAN
Talking a little bit more about Placer.ai specifically, Placer.ai is a tool that de Novo uses for location analysis. Can you guys talk a little bit more about what Placer.ai does?
ALLY
So Placer is a location based customer analytics tool. It does exactly what we were discussing as far as location analytics.
00;04;18;29 – 00;04;41;10
ALLY
It’s an online platform that uses individual’s cell phones to track their foot traffic and then uses AI to determine how many people are visiting a given location and layers on that information that we also can get as far as demographics, interests and things like that.
RYAN
So how does it actually track that, Julian? And like, how is it using people’s cell phones?
00;04;41;10 – 00;05;12;29
RYAN
How does that all work? I know that people were like, oh my gosh, the government’s tracking me. Is that true?
JULIAN
Well, no, it’s not necessarily true. Placer partners with over 30 different companies that specialize in collecting data analytics, and that even includes, you know, like the US Census Bureau, and it includes, like some KPI data aggregators, people who deal with, what are called MAIDs, which are mobile app identifiers.
00;05;13;02 – 00;05;41;18
JULIAN
Essentially, they work with a lot of applications, data brokers, they, Placer themselves, do not sell data. They work with the people who sell the data to turn it into something that marketers can, can use.
RYAN
So they partner with, with the Census Bureau and things like that for that overlay information. But a big thing that Placer really harps on is all of their individuals that are in what’s called their “panel” are opted in.
00;05;41;20 – 00;05;59;24
RYAN
And you opt in on a variety of different apps and things like that. So yes, they use apps that are already on on your phone. Right? Like you don’t have to download the Placer app in order to be in the panel. Like how do how does that work?
00;05;59;24 – 00;06;22;24
JULIAN
So there is no, there is no somebody saying, hey, I want to be on the Placer panel. I want to sign up to be one of these people that Placer like, is tracking essentially. You yourself can end up on a Placer panel if you download an app, whether it be a coupon app, a travel app, game, social media, finance, a lot of these things in the terms and conditions, you’ll end up agreeing to being on a Placer panel, even if you may or may not know it.
00;06;22;27 – 00;06;43;12
JULIAN
You are consenting to being on a Placer panel, so it’s not like they’re doing it without people kind of accepting and agreeing to being on the panel. However, you may not know my data is going to Placer.
RYAN
Right. So those terms and conditions, those terms of service, they are important. So when you do, accept those, you are opting into Placer technically.
00;06;43;12 – 00;07;18;13
RYAN
They are not collecting any personal information about you. They kind of hash it or they kind of strip your name and different things off of it, but it still does give that really strong customer profile that we were talking about earlier in the episode.
JULIAN
Right. All personally identifiable information is stripped, and they actually do have a very, they make a big effort in protecting all of the data that they have and encrypting it and essentially creating a, a cloud based, secure data warehouse.
00;07;18;16 – 00;07;41;06
RYAN
And, and one thing about the Placer tool at least, and most of our location intelligence tools or our, customer analytics tools, it’s not tracking every single person that is walking through your door. It is tracking the people who are in the panel. And there’s 25 million individuals in the United States that are on this panel, and then they extrapolate it using AI.
00;07;41;08 – 00;08;02;16
RYAN
But it’s not just like a simple metric. It’s not just a simple multiplier effect. So for every one person who’s in our panel, it’s there are five individuals that live there. So you can’t just multiply the number by five. It actually takes into account the type of the type of person that I am. For example, my multiplier for a given location might be 1.2.
00;08;02;18 – 00;08;23;24
RYAN
Julian’s multiplier for a given location might be four, and they kind of extrapolate it that way. So it’s it’s much more advanced than just a, a simple multiplier. But the other thing that they do, they verify it, so they verify it against physical foot traffic. Can you talk a little bit more about that.
JULIAN
Yeah. So they will even check with a lot of their partners.
00;08;23;24 – 00;08;48;26
JULIAN
They work with, you know, things like theme parks, Major League Baseball. They will check the data that they have extrapolated against real data that they have. So let’s say they, you know, are double checking their data from an MLB stadium, like two weeks ago, they will check the actual attendance numbers for that game and check it against what their algorithm has extrapolated.
00;08;49;02 – 00;09;11;03
RYAN
And typically I want to say it’s about 99% or more accurate to the actual attendance numbers. And they’re in the you know, the nature of an algorithm is constantly being updated to be as accurate as possible.
RYAN
Yeah. So they take the data that we know and they just check it against themselves and they’re like, hey, guess what? We’re right.
00;09;11;06 – 00;09;33;19
RYAN
So that means that we customers, anyone who uses Placer, or other tools like this can be confident, right?
JULIAN
Yeah.
RYAN
What kind of information, and Ally, this is a question for you. What kind of information does Placer and other tools like this let you collect?
ALLY
So much information. So Placer gives us all sorts of information.
00;09;33;22 – 00;09;55;15
ALLY
The kind of the biggest things that we get to see are where they come from, where they go, we get to see where people live, where they work. It gives us heat maps of all this data so we can see where our superfans live. This is based on frequency of visits and it also lets us know how far they’re willing to travel to a location.
00;09;55;15 – 00;10;19;16
ALLY
So how far is the reach of our market? It shows us times of day, days of week that are most popular. It also gives us information about the education level, household income, marital status, and so much more about our customers, which lets us then create a profile to better target others like them.
RYAN
Yeah, so we’re figuring out who our main customers are, especially our superfans.
00;10;19;16 – 00;10;40;17
RYAN
If we can figure out who comes to a given location a lot. So, for example, the Cherry Building where de Novo is, we can see how many times individuals come to the Cherry Building and be like, oh, this type of person comes to the Cherry Building 15 times a year. We want more people like that. But you could think of that for your restaurant, for your business and figure out that profile for them. Right?
ALLY
Correct.
RYAN
You mentioned that, it allows you to see where they live and, like, where they work. How does it actually determine that information, though?
ALLY
So it’s mostly looking at the amount of time and the time of day that you’re spending somewhere. So, for example, if they’re looking at where you work, if you’re somewhere, Monday through Friday, 9 to 5, obviously this is different for different types of work, but if you’re somewhere regularly for an extended amount of time, that is generally they’re going to say that’s your workplace.
00;11;14;00 – 00;11;36;12
ALLY
It is anonymized. So it’s not like, oh, hey, this one person is working at the Cherry Building and they live on this street. But it does the same for where you live. So where are you essentially camping out for the night? And are you going there every day? And then it gives a general radius around that area.
00;11;36;12 – 00;12;07;12
ALLY
So again it’s not giving you the exact addresses of the customers, but it’s saying, okay, it’s like on this street in this neighborhood, so it gets pretty narrow, but without giving away any private information.
JULIAN
Yeah. So you might know the neighborhood of where somebody that you might be able to find, like popular cities, if you, if people are coming from all around America, like, it could be very good to know, like this particular city, really likes, likes my business.
00;12;07;15 – 00;12;28;02
JULIAN
And yeah, like you said, the data is anonymized, and they also make sure, like, for some other privacy things, like they make sure if they know that the person is under 18, they’re not going to be tracking this person. They’re also sensitive locations that they make sure not to track, whether it’s a women’s health center or a military base or rehabilitation centers, things like that.
00;12;28;02 – 00;12;55;27
JULIAN
Even schools, they make sure to kind of limit the data that’s coming from these sensitive locations, and they make sure that the data is anonymized. So we’re not at Skynet yet.
RYAN
Yet. Yet.So they basically just track, like, where you live, and where you work. Why is that information important? Why is it important to know if somebody works at this location versus if them if they’re just a visitor?
00;12;55;29 – 00;13;27;22
ALLY
I mean, it can make a big difference if it’s someone who is working at your location, you want to be able to exclude them from your visitor traffic so that your workers don’t skew your data in any way. But it can also give you information on people working around if you have a physical restaurant or grocery store, being able to target people who may not live nearby but work nearby, who are more likely to during the day or right after work, visit your location.
00;13;27;24 – 00;13;48;02
RYAN
Nice. So we’ve talked about a few different things. What type of business is location analytics good for like who should be using it? Who can use it?
ALLY
Yeah. I mean, it’s good for almost anyone, whether you have a physical location, whether you have a chain of physical locations, or even if you’re an online store who has competitors, who have physical locations.
00;13;48;04 – 00;14;17;13
ALLY
So this really can be from small businesses to the largest chains. I mean, we’re talking Walmart, McDonald’s, literally anything. But it isn’t just businesses. So we can even use this for, you know, specific neighborhoods, especially like a downtown district where you can get data on who’s working downtown, who’s visiting downtown, how can we, you know, improve the district in those ways?
00;14;17;15 – 00;14;37;16
ALLY
It gives you information about events. So if you have a specific event…
RYAN
…like a farmer’s market, right?
ALLY
Yeah. Or an event venue, it can give you a lot of information based on that. So essentially, it’s good for almost any business. We do run into some issues with multi-story buildings or any buildings that have multiple floors like malls.
00;14;37;16 – 00;15;05;06
ALLY
And of course, as Julian mentioned, some of those more sensitive locations.
RYAN
So now let’s talk about more ways that we can use it. We mentioned knowing about where your super fans are coming from, but what are some other ways that we use this location data?
JULIAN
I think, one of the cool uses for it could be if you’re purchasing traditional media or planning to put up billboards for your clients, you can actually see the routes that your super fans and that your visitors take.
00;15;05;09 – 00;15;27;02
JULIAN
Whether it be certain highways, roads, streets, and you can see these high traffic, these roadways and place billboards on them or you can see other kinds of shopping districts that your typical customer likes to frequent. And then you can put your advertisements in those spaces.
RYAN
Yeah. So it’s not even just like the same city. We’re not just talking about neighborhoods.
00;15;27;07 – 00;15;49;13
RYAN
I think you mentioned earlier, Julian, we’re talking about communities. So if we’re advertising a community in Iowa and they get a lot of traffic from the Midwest, we can see the routes, the roads that people are taking, whether it be to go there or on family vacations. It’s like, hey, here’s a billboard for our business, our restaurant, because we know a lot of people are traveling on that road, right?
00;15;49;16 – 00;16;13;05
JULIAN
Right.
ALLY
In addition to knowing where your super fans live, Placer gives you the opportunity to find your true trade areas. So the exact, down to the neighborhood or zip code, location of your customers, whether they’re super fans or they’ve been to your location one time, you can also then overlay that with or view your competitors trade areas.
00;16;13;05 – 00;16;40;27
ALLY
This gives you some really cool information about where the overlap lies or where you have opportunity for poaching, maybe…
RYAN
…a nice way of saying it, a nice way of saying it.
ALLY
…just you know, the best places to advertise. As far as location, this also helps you discover top competitors. So maybe you thought that one store was your top competitor, but then really looking at it, it’s someone else.
00;16;41;00 – 00;17;09;15
ALLY
It can also give you opportunities for even partnerships or cross promotions. If there’s a similar business minded business or someone that you could partner with that you are seeing people going back and forth between you and them. So opportunities there for increased visibility, as we mentioned before, it can improve ad efficacy. So it just gives us a better clear view of our true customer and our true market.
00;17;09;15 – 00;17;30;14
ALLY
And then we can use that information to then target similar people on digital.
RYAN
So, Ally, you previously said where they come from, where they go, what does that actually look like? Like how what do you mean like where what communities they’re going to or like, where are they going back home? Or like, what information can we actually get about their journey?
00;17;30;14 – 00;17;52;13
ALLY
So we get information about specific locations that they’re coming from. We can look at, oh, they are primarily people coming from home or work, but then we actually get a breakdown of the businesses or locations that they’re coming from and the same after they leave. So we can look and see. Okay.
00;17;52;13 – 00;18;16;27
ALLY
So they left my competitor and came to me because that competitor apparently didn’t have what they were looking for. or you can see it vice versa. And you’re like, okay, what did they have? Why did they go to them after being at my location? So it gets really specific as far as the journey people take, and gives you a lot of information about their movements directly before and after visiting you.
00;18;16;29 – 00;18;50;03
ALLY
It does give you also like they call it favorite places. So this is a little bit more information on where they frequent outside of your business. So less where they are right before they come or where they go right after, but where they are spending a lot of their time.
RYAN
So like a a clothing or a clothing store or, or a boutique, for example, like their favorite places, it might be a lot of plant stores and then all of a sudden you’re like, okay, we want to target people online who like plant stores because they’re more likely to like our boutique, because we know our superfans are people that like to go here.
00;18;50;03 – 00;19;11;26
RYAN
Their favorite places are plant stores, right?
ALLY
Yeah.
JULIAN
Not only can you use something like Placer.ai to plan out a marketing strategy or plan and decide who to target. But you can then go back and use the place your data to test. Was my marketing effective? You can see. Did I get more people of this demographic?
00;19;11;27 – 00;19;33;05
JULIAN
You know, this month versus the previous month before we had implemented this plan to, let’s say, get more people of a higher income into my business. Did we actually see a jump in these visitors, of that demographic? And you can actually, you know, prove did we get the people in that we were looking to, draw into our business?
00;19;33;08 – 00;19;55;00
RYAN
So if everything’s like digital, it’s really easy to say, like, oh, did we sell more sweatshirts online? Did we sell more event tickets online, or did we get more questions online? Right. This is taking the same information that we track online, but adding like a, a conversion point for in-store traffic. Like we can track to see the efficacy of our ads.
00;19;55;02 – 00;20;12;20
RYAN
If our main goal is to drive people to a location. Right. It’s not just like, oh, tracking how many times they click the map button to get directions to our location. It’s actually showing an uptick in traffic, which is something we’ve never been able to do before.
JULIAN
Yeah. And from where is that traffic and who is actually driving that traffic? Who makes up that traffic?
00;20;12;20 – 00;20;36;10
RYAN
This is also helpful for grant information. So if you’re a nonprofit and you are writing a grant for a new product, you might want to know exactly who is currently coming to your location. You also might do a marketing grant to attract different communities, underserved populations, different things like that. And you can actually track to see if that’s working.
00;20;36;10 – 00;20;59;27
RYAN
So not even necessarily retail restaurants, things like that. Nonprofits can really leverage places as well like museums, to see who’s coming to their museum, see where they’re coming from, how what’s the reach of your museum? We talked about true trade areas, and that’s just not a radius. So lots of times in marketing it’s like, oh yeah, we’ll draw a ten mile radius around our location and make a perfect circle.
00;21;00;02 – 00;21;24;27
RYAN
Well, a true trade area is not actually a circle. It is little pockets of people and a little heat map around there. So your circle then becomes almost like a, for lack of a better term, a glob, a glob of, where your actual people are. So you’re not wasting your marketing dollars attracting the whole circle or the whole state you’re targeting that in and refining it to make the most of your marketing budget.
00;21;25;00 – 00;21;43;07
RYAN
So a lot of benefits of digital advertising are we can use cookies, we can use search history, different things like that in order to target our ads. But I’ve heard in the news lately, Ally, that some of this cookie information might be going away. Talk a little bit more about that. Is that scary or are we fine?
00;21;43;09 – 00;22;20;10
ALLY
I mean, it can be scary if you’re not prepared. It’s definitely, marketing is moving more or kind of back, to more contextual targeting. So understanding your audience and their movements and their likes and dislikes more than being able to target specific individuals based on what they’ve done. So we’re really going to have to dig deep into our understanding of our audience, instead of relying on things like cookies to tell us who our audiences are.
RYAN
We actually have to understand who our customer is to do marketing?!
00;22;20;10 – 00;22;52;06
RYAN
Yeah. Not fair. Not fair at all.
ALLY
I agree, it’s crazy.
RYAN
Ally, you said if you’re prepared for it, like, what does that mean? What do you have to prepare for?
ALLY
Essentially cookies, as long as you have opted into them, will continue to work. However, more and more people are opting out, or making the decision to not have their information tracked, especially as it becomes easier to do that, with a lot of the privacy policies that are going into place.
00;22;52;08 – 00;23;22;14
ALLY
I mean, we’ve got one in Iowa and that’s going to be coming in 2025. There’s one at the federal level being eventually, probably figured out…hopefully. And so these are essentially going to force users, our force entities, businesses, anyone with a website to get explicit consent to be able to place cookies for people. Before, we didn’t really have to ask.
00;23;22;16 – 00;23;45;06
ALLY
We could just have cookies. We could track anybody who landed on the site. And that was really the main reason why we were able to follow people around on the internet. That’s why you were able to get ads from a site you visited two days ago on the site that you’re viewing or on Facebook.
00;23;45;09 – 00;24;15;18
ALLY
But due to privacy concerns, most, most platforms actually already do this. Google is just obviously the big one. And they’re still in the process of making this change, but it is coming. So eventually it will be no cookies unless specifically people are opting in. And that is less likely, I think, the more that privacy is talked about, the more people are going to be concerned with it.
00;24;15;21 – 00;24;49;21
JULIAN
Yes. Yeah. For some context, there’s plenty of regulations going around when it comes to user privacy, especially online. Cookies are just a little bit of code that gets put on your computer and it pretty much tracks you. Once you visit a website, the data can be very personal. It can also be very general. So as privacy policies are implemented across the globe and as user privacy is more at the top of people’s mind, and people have more of an opportunity to have their data not be tracked, they have the opportunity to opt out of cookies and other identifiable information.
00;24;49;24 – 00;25;15;19
JULIAN<
RYAN
We’re doing this. All right.
JEN
Hello and welcome to this. Where are you talking? Oh my God. All right, we’ll try this again. Ryan, are you settled?
RYAN
Settled.
00;00;20;18 – 00;00;41;06
JEN
Okay. Hello, and welcome to Think Fresh, a podcast brought to you by de Novo Marketing’s Collective Creative. Coming to you from our Ideas Institute and here to talk about all things marketing. Insights on new trends, innovative ideas and marketing tools you can use in your day to day life, and whatever else we deem relevant. I’m Jen Neumann, de novo CEO and your host.
00;00;41;08 – 00;01;05;15
RYAN
And I’m Ryan Shenefelt, account manager, innovation and education lead and resident nosy eavesdropper, always looking to push the envelope.
JEN
He is indeed very, very nosy.
RYAN
Today, we’re going to talk about customer analytics tools, specifically Placer.ai. Today’s episode is a solo cast. Jen is not with us today, but we are being joined by two fellow deNovians. Today we have Ally Machalan and Julian Klepach.
00;01;05;15 – 00;01;27;14
RYAN
Welcome to Think Fresh friends! For the people listening, can you tell us a little bit more about your roles at de Novo?
ALLY
Thanks. Ryan. This is Ally Machala. I am the digital strategist here at de Novo. So, spending a lot of my time in paid campaigns and helping clients, put together strategies that get results.
00;01;27;14 – 00;01;49;10
RYAN
Awesome, awesome. Julian, what about you?
JULIAN
Well, thank you for introducing me, Ryan. I’m the digital coordinator here at de Novo. You could call me Ally’s right hand man. but I also do a lot of organic social media and digital marketing as well.
RYAN
And, Julian, you you have been known as our resident Gen Z.
JULIAN
Yes.
00;01;49;14 – 00;02;11;03
RYAN
Thank you for thank you for keeping us fresh. So today we’re going to be talking about location analysis specifically for our customers or your competition’s customers. Ally, Julian, can you tell me a little bit more about like what location analysis is and why it’s important for us?
JULIAN
So location analytics help you know more about the people who are actually coming and going
into and from a given location, which in turn will help us better target our advertising campaigns without having to, let’s say, manually survey all of the people who come into a store or coming to, an event. So before digital advertising, everything was dependent on location and those physical visits. And that’s still just as important. But now we have a few more tools to work with. When you make advertising campaigns, especially digital ones, a lot of the time these days you are kind of guessing.
00;02;40;13 – 00;03;04;27
JULIAN
These are the type of people that we need to reach. Something like location analytics takes that guesswork out.
RYAN
Yeah. So digital advertising now, we know it’s really reliant on cookies and determining what you’re searching for, things you search for in the past… kind of building a profile around your audience. So we have access to all of that. But it doesn’t necessarily say how many people are coming into your location.
00;03;04;29 – 00;03;22;14
RYAN
The only way to get that in the past has been like door counters or physically counting how many people are at an event, or how many people are in your store, in your shop. Or even in your community at a given time. But with this tool, it allows us to actually track that in as real of time as possible.
00;03;22;16 – 00;03;50;27
ALLY
Essentially, it tells you very specifically where your people are coming from. So location wise, but it also give us information on demographics, similar interests and just all kinds of information that we can then use to implement better targeting, using contextual targeting, like what are their favorite places? Where do they go after they visit your store?
00;03;50;29 – 00;04;18;26
ALLY
What part of the city or state, or neighborhood, even are they living in?
RYAN
Talking a little bit more about Placer.ai specifically, Placer.ai is a tool that de Novo uses for location analysis. Can you guys talk a little bit more about what Placer.ai does?
ALLY
So Placer is a location based customer analytics tool. It does exactly what we were discussing as far as location analytics.
00;04;18;29 – 00;04;41;10
ALLY
It’s an online platform that uses individual’s cell phones to track their foot traffic and then uses AI to determine how many people are visiting a given location and layers on that information that we also can get as far as demographics, interests and things like that.
RYAN
So how does it actually track that, Julian? And like, how is it using people’s cell phones?
00;04;41;10 – 00;05;12;29
RYAN
How does that all work? I know that people were like, oh my gosh, the government’s tracking me. Is that true?
JULIAN
Well, no, it’s not necessarily true. Placer partners with over 30 different companies that specialize in collecting data analytics, and that even includes, you know, like the US Census Bureau, and it includes, like some KPI data aggregators, people who deal with, what are called MAIDs, which are mobile app identifiers.
00;05;13;02 – 00;05;41;18
JULIAN
Essentially, they work with a lot of applications, data brokers, they, Placer themselves, do not sell data. They work with the people who sell the data to turn it into something that marketers can, can use.
RYAN
So they partner with, with the Census Bureau and things like that for that overlay information. But a big thing that Placer really harps on is all of their individuals that are in what’s called their “panel” are opted in.
00;05;41;20 – 00;05;59;24
RYAN
And you opt in on a variety of different apps and things like that. So yes, they use apps that are already on on your phone. Right? Like you don’t have to download the Placer app in order to be in the panel. Like how do how does that work?
00;05;59;24 – 00;06;22;24
JULIAN
So there is no, there is no somebody saying, hey, I want to be on the Placer panel. I want to sign up to be one of these people that Placer like, is tracking essentially. You yourself can end up on a Placer panel if you download an app, whether it be a coupon app, a travel app, game, social media, finance, a lot of these things in the terms and conditions, you’ll end up agreeing to being on a Placer panel, even if you may or may not know it.
00;06;22;27 – 00;06;43;12
JULIAN
You are consenting to being on a Placer panel, so it’s not like they’re doing it without people kind of accepting and agreeing to being on the panel. However, you may not know my data is going to Placer.
RYAN
Right. So those terms and conditions, those terms of service, they are important. So when you do, accept those, you are opting into Placer technically.
00;06;43;12 – 00;07;18;13
RYAN
They are not collecting any personal information about you. They kind of hash it or they kind of strip your name and different things off of it, but it still does give that really strong customer profile that we were talking about earlier in the episode.
JULIAN
Right. All personally identifiable information is stripped, and they actually do have a very, they make a big effort in protecting all of the data that they have and encrypting it and essentially creating a, a cloud based, secure data warehouse.
00;07;18;16 – 00;07;41;06
RYAN
And, and one thing about the Placer tool at least, and most of our location intelligence tools or our, customer analytics tools, it’s not tracking every single person that is walking through your door. It is tracking the people who are in the panel. And there’s 25 million individuals in the United States that are on this panel, and then they extrapolate it using AI.
00;07;41;08 – 00;08;02;16
RYAN
But it’s not just like a simple metric. It’s not just a simple multiplier effect. So for every one person who’s in our panel, it’s there are five individuals that live there. So you can’t just multiply the number by five. It actually takes into account the type of the type of person that I am. For example, my multiplier for a given location might be 1.2.
00;08;02;18 – 00;08;23;24
RYAN
Julian’s multiplier for a given location might be four, and they kind of extrapolate it that way. So it’s it’s much more advanced than just a, a simple multiplier. But the other thing that they do, they verify it, so they verify it against physical foot traffic. Can you talk a little bit more about that.
JULIAN
Yeah. So they will even check with a lot of their partners.
00;08;23;24 – 00;08;48;26
JULIAN
They work with, you know, things like theme parks, Major League Baseball. They will check the data that they have extrapolated against real data that they have. So let’s say they, you know, are double checking their data from an MLB stadium, like two weeks ago, they will check the actual attendance numbers for that game and check it against what their algorithm has extrapolated.
00;08;49;02 – 00;09;11;03
RYAN
And typically I want to say it’s about 99% or more accurate to the actual attendance numbers. And they’re in the you know, the nature of an algorithm is constantly being updated to be as accurate as possible.
RYAN
Yeah. So they take the data that we know and they just check it against themselves and they’re like, hey, guess what? We’re right.
00;09;11;06 – 00;09;33;19
RYAN
So that means that we customers, anyone who uses Placer, or other tools like this can be confident, right?
JULIAN
Yeah.
RYAN
What kind of information, and Ally, this is a question for you. What kind of information does Placer and other tools like this let you collect?
ALLY
So much information. So Placer gives us all sorts of information.
00;09;33;22 – 00;09;55;15
ALLY
The kind of the biggest things that we get to see are where they come from, where they go, we get to see where people live, where they work. It gives us heat maps of all this data so we can see where our superfans live. This is based on frequency of visits and it also lets us know how far they’re willing to travel to a location.
00;09;55;15 – 00;10;19;16
ALLY
So how far is the reach of our market? It shows us times of day, days of week that are most popular. It also gives us information about the education level, household income, marital status, and so much more about our customers, which lets us then create a profile to better target others like them.
RYAN
Yeah, so we’re figuring out who our main customers are, especially our superfans.
00;10;19;16 – 00;10;40;17
RYAN
If we can figure out who comes to a given location a lot. So, for example, the Cherry Building where de Novo is, we can see how many times individuals come to the Cherry Building and be like, oh, this type of person comes to the Cherry Building 15 times a year. We want more people like that. But you could think of that for your restaurant, for your business and figure out that profile for them. Right?
ALLY
Correct.
RYAN
You mentioned that, it allows you to see where they live and, like, where they work. How does it actually determine that information, though?
ALLY
So it’s mostly looking at the amount of time and the time of day that you’re spending somewhere. So, for example, if they’re looking at where you work, if you’re somewhere, Monday through Friday, 9 to 5, obviously this is different for different types of work, but if you’re somewhere regularly for an extended amount of time, that is generally they’re going to say that’s your workplace.
00;11;14;00 – 00;11;36;12
ALLY
It is anonymized. So it’s not like, oh, hey, this one person is working at the Cherry Building and they live on this street. But it does the same for where you live. So where are you essentially camping out for the night? And are you going there every day? And then it gives a general radius around that area.
00;11;36;12 – 00;12;07;12
ALLY
So again it’s not giving you the exact addresses of the customers, but it’s saying, okay, it’s like on this street in this neighborhood, so it gets pretty narrow, but without giving away any private information.
JULIAN
Yeah. So you might know the neighborhood of where somebody that you might be able to find, like popular cities, if you, if people are coming from all around America, like, it could be very good to know, like this particular city, really likes, likes my business.
00;12;07;15 – 00;12;28;02
JULIAN
And yeah, like you said, the data is anonymized, and they also make sure, like, for some other privacy things, like they make sure if they know that the person is under 18, they’re not going to be tracking this person. They’re also sensitive locations that they make sure not to track, whether it’s a women’s health center or a military base or rehabilitation centers, things like that.
00;12;28;02 – 00;12;55;27
JULIAN
Even schools, they make sure to kind of limit the data that’s coming from these sensitive locations, and they make sure that the data is anonymized. So we’re not at Skynet yet.
RYAN
Yet. Yet.So they basically just track, like, where you live, and where you work. Why is that information important? Why is it important to know if somebody works at this location versus if them if they’re just a visitor?
00;12;55;29 – 00;13;27;22
ALLY
I mean, it can make a big difference if it’s someone who is working at your location, you want to be able to exclude them from your visitor traffic so that your workers don’t skew your data in any way. But it can also give you information on people working around if you have a physical restaurant or grocery store, being able to target people who may not live nearby but work nearby, who are more likely to during the day or right after work, visit your location.
00;13;27;24 – 00;13;48;02
RYAN
Nice. So we’ve talked about a few different things. What type of business is location analytics good for like who should be using it? Who can use it?
ALLY
Yeah. I mean, it’s good for almost anyone, whether you have a physical location, whether you have a chain of physical locations, or even if you’re an online store who has competitors, who have physical locations.
00;13;48;04 – 00;14;17;13
ALLY
So this really can be from small businesses to the largest chains. I mean, we’re talking Walmart, McDonald’s, literally anything. But it isn’t just businesses. So we can even use this for, you know, specific neighborhoods, especially like a downtown district where you can get data on who’s working downtown, who’s visiting downtown, how can we, you know, improve the district in those ways?
00;14;17;15 – 00;14;37;16
ALLY
It gives you information about events. So if you have a specific event…
RYAN
…like a farmer’s market, right?
ALLY
Yeah. Or an event venue, it can give you a lot of information based on that. So essentially, it’s good for almost any business. We do run into some issues with multi-story buildings or any buildings that have multiple floors like malls.
00;14;37;16 – 00;15;05;06
ALLY
And of course, as Julian mentioned, some of those more sensitive locations.
RYAN
So now let’s talk about more ways that we can use it. We mentioned knowing about where your super fans are coming from, but what are some other ways that we use this location data?
JULIAN
I think, one of the cool uses for it could be if you’re purchasing traditional media or planning to put up billboards for your clients, you can actually see the routes that your super fans and that your visitors take.
00;15;05;09 – 00;15;27;02
JULIAN
Whether it be certain highways, roads, streets, and you can see these high traffic, these roadways and place billboards on them or you can see other kinds of shopping districts that your typical customer likes to frequent. And then you can put your advertisements in those spaces.
RYAN
Yeah. So it’s not even just like the same city. We’re not just talking about neighborhoods.
00;15;27;07 – 00;15;49;13
RYAN
I think you mentioned earlier, Julian, we’re talking about communities. So if we’re advertising a community in Iowa and they get a lot of traffic from the Midwest, we can see the routes, the roads that people are taking, whether it be to go there or on family vacations. It’s like, hey, here’s a billboard for our business, our restaurant, because we know a lot of people are traveling on that road, right?
00;15;49;16 – 00;16;13;05
JULIAN
Right.
ALLY
In addition to knowing where your super fans live, Placer gives you the opportunity to find your true trade areas. So the exact, down to the neighborhood or zip code, location of your customers, whether they’re super fans or they’ve been to your location one time, you can also then overlay that with or view your competitors trade areas.
00;16;13;05 – 00;16;40;27
ALLY
This gives you some really cool information about where the overlap lies or where you have opportunity for poaching, maybe…
RYAN
…a nice way of saying it, a nice way of saying it.
ALLY
…just you know, the best places to advertise. As far as location, this also helps you discover top competitors. So maybe you thought that one store was your top competitor, but then really looking at it, it’s someone else.
00;16;41;00 – 00;17;09;15
ALLY
It can also give you opportunities for even partnerships or cross promotions. If there’s a similar business minded business or someone that you could partner with that you are seeing people going back and forth between you and them. So opportunities there for increased visibility, as we mentioned before, it can improve ad efficacy. So it just gives us a better clear view of our true customer and our true market.
00;17;09;15 – 00;17;30;14
ALLY
And then we can use that information to then target similar people on digital.
RYAN
So, Ally, you previously said where they come from, where they go, what does that actually look like? Like how what do you mean like where what communities they’re going to or like, where are they going back home? Or like, what information can we actually get about their journey?
00;17;30;14 – 00;17;52;13
ALLY
So we get information about specific locations that they’re coming from. We can look at, oh, they are primarily people coming from home or work, but then we actually get a breakdown of the businesses or locations that they’re coming from and the same after they leave. So we can look and see. Okay.
00;17;52;13 – 00;18;16;27
ALLY
So they left my competitor and came to me because that competitor apparently didn’t have what they were looking for. or you can see it vice versa. And you’re like, okay, what did they have? Why did they go to them after being at my location? So it gets really specific as far as the journey people take, and gives you a lot of information about their movements directly before and after visiting you.
00;18;16;29 – 00;18;50;03
ALLY
It does give you also like they call it favorite places. So this is a little bit more information on where they frequent outside of your business. So less where they are right before they come or where they go right after, but where they are spending a lot of their time.
RYAN
So like a a clothing or a clothing store or, or a boutique, for example, like their favorite places, it might be a lot of plant stores and then all of a sudden you’re like, okay, we want to target people online who like plant stores because they’re more likely to like our boutique, because we know our superfans are people that like to go here.
00;18;50;03 – 00;19;11;26
RYAN
Their favorite places are plant stores, right?
ALLY
Yeah.
JULIAN
Not only can you use something like Placer.ai to plan out a marketing strategy or plan and decide who to target. But you can then go back and use the place your data to test. Was my marketing effective? You can see. Did I get more people of this demographic?
00;19;11;27 – 00;19;33;05
JULIAN
You know, this month versus the previous month before we had implemented this plan to, let’s say, get more people of a higher income into my business. Did we actually see a jump in these visitors, of that demographic? And you can actually, you know, prove did we get the people in that we were looking to, draw into our business?
00;19;33;08 – 00;19;55;00
RYAN
So if everything’s like digital, it’s really easy to say, like, oh, did we sell more sweatshirts online? Did we sell more event tickets online, or did we get more questions online? Right. This is taking the same information that we track online, but adding like a, a conversion point for in-store traffic. Like we can track to see the efficacy of our ads.
00;19;55;02 – 00;20;12;20
RYAN
If our main goal is to drive people to a location. Right. It’s not just like, oh, tracking how many times they click the map button to get directions to our location. It’s actually showing an uptick in traffic, which is something we’ve never been able to do before.
JULIAN
Yeah. And from where is that traffic and who is actually driving that traffic? Who makes up that traffic?
00;20;12;20 – 00;20;36;10
RYAN
This is also helpful for grant information. So if you’re a nonprofit and you are writing a grant for a new product, you might want to know exactly who is currently coming to your location. You also might do a marketing grant to attract different communities, underserved populations, different things like that. And you can actually track to see if that’s working.
00;20;36;10 – 00;20;59;27
RYAN
So not even necessarily retail restaurants, things like that. Nonprofits can really leverage places as well like museums, to see who’s coming to their museum, see where they’re coming from, how what’s the reach of your museum? We talked about true trade areas, and that’s just not a radius. So lots of times in marketing it’s like, oh yeah, we’ll draw a ten mile radius around our location and make a perfect circle.
00;21;00;02 – 00;21;24;27
RYAN
Well, a true trade area is not actually a circle. It is little pockets of people and a little heat map around there. So your circle then becomes almost like a, for lack of a better term, a glob, a glob of, where your actual people are. So you’re not wasting your marketing dollars attracting the whole circle or the whole state you’re targeting that in and refining it to make the most of your marketing budget.
00;21;25;00 – 00;21;43;07
RYAN
So a lot of benefits of digital advertising are we can use cookies, we can use search history, different things like that in order to target our ads. But I’ve heard in the news lately, Ally, that some of this cookie information might be going away. Talk a little bit more about that. Is that scary or are we fine?
00;21;43;09 – 00;22;20;10
ALLY
I mean, it can be scary if you’re not prepared. It’s definitely, marketing is moving more or kind of back, to more contextual targeting. So understanding your audience and their movements and their likes and dislikes more than being able to target specific individuals based on what they’ve done. So we’re really going to have to dig deep into our understanding of our audience, instead of relying on things like cookies to tell us who our audiences are.
RYAN
We actually have to understand who our customer is to do marketing?!
00;22;20;10 – 00;22;52;06
RYAN
Yeah. Not fair. Not fair at all.
ALLY
I agree, it’s crazy.
RYAN
Ally, you said if you’re prepared for it, like, what does that mean? What do you have to prepare for?
ALLY
Essentially cookies, as long as you have opted into them, will continue to work. However, more and more people are opting out, or making the decision to not have their information tracked, especially as it becomes easier to do that, with a lot of the privacy policies that are going into place.
00;22;52;08 – 00;23;22;14
ALLY
I mean, we’ve got one in Iowa and that’s going to be coming in 2025. There’s one at the federal level being eventually, probably figured out…hopefully. And so these are essentially going to force users, our force entities, businesses, anyone with a website to get explicit consent to be able to place cookies for people. Before, we didn’t really have to ask.
00;23;22;16 – 00;23;45;06
ALLY
We could just have cookies. We could track anybody who landed on the site. And that was really the main reason why we were able to follow people around on the internet. That’s why you were able to get ads from a site you visited two days ago on the site that you’re viewing or on Facebook.
00;23;45;09 – 00;24;15;18
ALLY
But due to privacy concerns, most, most platforms actually already do this. Google is just obviously the big one. And they’re still in the process of making this change, but it is coming. So eventually it will be no cookies unless specifically people are opting in. And that is less likely, I think, the more that privacy is talked about, the more people are going to be concerned with it.
00;24;15;21 – 00;24;49;21
JULIAN
Yes. Yeah. For some context, there’s plenty of regulations going around when it comes to user privacy, especially online. Cookies are just a little bit of code that gets put on your computer and it pretty much tracks you. Once you visit a website, the data can be very personal. It can also be very general. So as privacy policies are implemented across the globe and as user privacy is more at the top of people’s mind, and people have more of an opportunity to have their data not be tracked, they have the opportunity to opt out of cookies and other identifiable information.
00;24;49;24 – 00;25;15;19
JULIAN<
