Marketers will continue to embrace use cases for location data beyond proximity-based push alerts and advertising. Location will be used to enhance more aspects of the shopping journey, including in-store augmented experiences, simplified mobile checkout, product reviews and tutorials, and in-store navigation.

Machine learning will be applied to location data audiences. Up to this point, audiences have been largely defined by devices that have been to a location. We’ll start to see predictive modeling used to find devices that are expected to visit a location in the future.

Fraud will creep into location data sets. As much as data buyers became aware of issues with overlapping datasets in 2017, they will become aware of the monetary impact from fraudulent data in 2018.

As much as marketers will love using location data, there will be a corresponding rise in questions and articles about who collects location data and how, how it is used, and ultimately kept secure. Because location data feels much more personal, it requires greater sensitivity, transparency and security from any company working in the location industry.

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The upcoming May 2018 EU GDPR regulations will surprise many companies that don’t expect to be affected. Any EU data is subject to its still-to-be-finalized requirements, which means even small publishers with European users should be planning to address GDPR requirements.

Quality of location data will become more important. This doesn’t just mean accuracy of the location data, but also the accuracy of the points of interest that location data is matched against.  Location quality scoring will become a trend and will initially be disjointed with multiple parties providing various methods of scoring, but companies should align for a common standard in partnership with industry trade groups.

We’ll continue getting closer to showing true “closed loop” attribution, meaning a company can trace the ad view to an in-store visit to purchase with enough data to be statistically relevant and not simply inferred. We won’t get all of the way there in 2018 as there are still too many siloed systems to integrate, as well as privacy concerns to address.

Reveal Mobile helps companies leverage location-based audience segments to improve their advertising campaigns and inform their product decisions across their own mobile apps as well as social media platforms.

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