Location analytics company Placed is now offering a ranking system for brick-and-mortar retailers, restaurants and other destinations, based on data from its Placed Panels and Placed Affiliate programs. In March 2013, McDonald’s was the top US business based on the number of visitors, while Applebee’s and Sonic Drive-In both saw increases in their rankings compared to January 2013.
According to the new Placed Insights, 49% of consumers visited McDonald’s during the month; not far behind, Walmart saw 38.8% of consumers visit their locations. The other top businesses included Subway, Burger King, Starbucks, Wendy’s, Walgreens, CVS, Taco Bell, and Target.
The new Placed Insights pulls data from the 70,000 users in the fully opt-in Placed Panels program, aggregating that information with location data gleaned from its Affiliate partners. Users supply self-reported demographic information and can connect to their Facebook account, providing even more data. The company then normalizes the data and offers clients an analytics suite explaining where people are in the physical world, their behaviors, and demographic details.
Previously, Placed allowed clients to build their own location-based panels to extract information and data, which is still available but can be supplemented with a larger, more representative data set. David Shim, CEO of Placed, likened the new offering to comScore, Arbitron, or Nielsen for physical location.
“Retailers have a fairly strong understanding of what happens inside their stores, but we give details about the demographics of that person, the behaviors of what they did before and after that store,” he told AdExchanger. “Say your audience is Hispanics with incomes of more than $50,000. You can pull the reports in our interface and see what businesses and categories of businesses this segment goes to, and you can start to build marketing campaigns or product mix approaches based on that data.”
With this new offering, Placed can also track how traffic patterns change over time. Looking at food and beverage businesses in January and March 2013, pizza and fried chicken restaurants saw a decline as football season ended in February, and Buffalo Wild Wings, a popular destination to watch sports, rose with March Madness. Of the top ten restaurant and beverage locations, Applebee’s and Sonic Drive-In saw increases in their rankings from January.
Placed also tracks demographic data and can inform marketers and brands which demographics may be more inclined to shop at their stores or competitors’ locations. For example, Asian consumers were 88% more likely to shop at Macy’s than the average consumer, while consumers over the age of 55 were 55% more likely to shop at J.C. Penney.
“Businesses are going to start to use this data for targeting as they start buying on the exchanges,” Shim said. “It gets really interesting because they can use location for different purposes.”
