Cost Per LoV: More on LBS Advertising

There is an interesting interview with Peter Friedland an equity analyst with the Soleil Group on GPS Business News. He predicts that besides navigation, that mobile search and mobile social networking will be the next two big areas of growth in LBS with a particular emphasis on search via cell phone and “connected” PNDs. Now it’s not much of a stretch to see the existing search advertising leaders get into paid listings, with a new data point, location, available to them to help target ads. In other words, instead of searching on a web site for “sweater” and having a link to the EddieBauer.com website come up, you’d search for “sweater” on your phone and have the nearest Eddie Bauer retail store location pop up on your phone along with turn by turn directions to get there.

This alone will certainly open up new categories of local ad dollars from neighborhood pizza joint and nail salons that aren’t currently big AdSense advertisers. But what is even more interesting is that location awareness can get the big national advertisers one step closer to what every ad buyer ultimately wants, which is to completely close the loop on measuring how and if ad dollars are working to accomplish their desired goal of more sales.

Granted location awareness can’t tell you if a consumer that saw your ad bought the advertised product, but it can take a giant step in that direction by measuring whether someone who saw your ad actually went to the place you told them, like your retail store location. A big reason for the success of online media has always been its accountability and measurability, when compared to traditional media. So if there is a way to make this palatable to the consumer, you can be sure that it won’t be too long before we have another new media term to add to CPC (cost per click) and CPA (cost per acquisition) … look out for the cost per LoV, (Location Visit).