With the introduction of the iPhone and the rapid evolution of smartphones and tablets, users could access the web wherever they were. They also became consistently accessible, with most mobile device owners becoming so attached to the technology that they never had it far from them and they never turned it off.  By far the biggest single piece of new information that is available from consumers’ mobile devices is the accurate location of the device, powered by the onboard GPS that has become a hallmark of all modern smartphones. Because shoppers take smartphones wherever they go, the device’s location acts as a proxy for the user’s location and provides clues to the shopper’s context during the purchase decision cycle, opening up a powerful new field for analytics.  This field, called Location Analytics, is the pairing of digital activity with physical world context. It is likely to be the most important field in digital analytics over the next decade, as it finally provides a more unified visibility into customers shop and engage with brands across the digital and physical worlds.

Get the full whitepaper here.