Just published on Think with Google - Mobile & Retail - This is the year of the supershopper. These savvy consumers have embraced mobile shopping, are open to new brands and products, and are turning to their devices for information and inspiration. Read more.

This PDF contains the slides from the Hidden Secrets of Beacon Data webinar, co-hosted by Reveal Mobile and The Location Based Marketing Association. We share new uses for beacons and never-before-seen data about the audiences bumping into beacons across the US. Brands will see examples of the type of audience data generated by placing beacons within retail locations. Which locations are most visited, which other places do customers visit, what other demographics can we learn? What can beacons tell us about Walmart or Target shoppers? What impact do beacons have on increasing audience data, building retargeting audiences, or driving app downloads? App publishers will hear advertising use cases leveraging both beacon-derived and location-based audience segments.

It's no secret that companies, brands, and retailers are deploying beacons by the tens of thousands. The majority of the use cases we read about focus on one primary use case for beacons: the push notification. Walk in to a store, have that store's app on your phone, the app detects the beacon, the app sends you a push notification based upon that beacon bump. This type of marketing, when done right, holds big potential for mobile marketing. We believe that there's even bigger potential to use beacons for two different reasons. Retargeting Attribution Because beacons work passively in the background, they enable companies to build bigger audiences. Using lat/long to place someone at a location typically requires that person to pen their phone at that location. Even then, the accuracy is pretty poor. There's a key point here: beacons build bigger audiences than lat/long. We analyzed visitors to the retail locations of the four major mobile carriers: Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, and T-Mobile. The result are pretty incredible. Verizon, which has beacons installed nationwide, builds audiences that were 200-300% larger than their peers. So what?

The annual South by Southwest conference is one of the largest gatherings of technology companies in the world. This year's event ran from March 11 through March 20, with over 70,000 people in attendance. Reveal Mobile was fortunate to attend, serving as moderator for The Location Based Marketing Association's panel discussion on location-based advertising effectiveness. Locations of devices when they bumped beacons along 6th Street in Austin, TX LOCATIONS OF DEVICES WHEN THEY BUMPED BEACONS ALONG 6TH STREET IN AUSTIN, TX While we were there, we did a little poking around to see if we could detect beacons. Conference organizers deployed around 1,000 beacons in 2015. Were other companies also deploying beacons? While we did manually detect a few beacons ourselves, we let the network of apps with our mobile audience SDK inside do the heavy lifting. Because our tech sits inside a few hundred apps across the country, we should be able to detect lots of beacons at SXSW. Guess what? We did! In this report we share the number of beacons detected, how many companies we think deployed beacons, and what app publishers and advertisers should do with this kind of data.

The gaming market, especially mobile gaming, has been growing fast over recent years. Games are the most popular mobile app category in iTunes App Stores and gaming experts predict the mobile gaming market will double by 2016.

It’s likely that part of the growth of mobile gaming comes from increased accessibility, as smartphones and tablets become more common. These devices, which aren’t necessarily purchased to play games, have helped attract people who wouldn’t traditionally consider themselves to be gamers.

With a mobile device always on hand, our research shows that average game session time has increased significantly. In 2014 an average game session was 4 minutes and in May 2015 it stands at 4.7 minutes.

Our Q2 2013 Mobile Barcode Trend Report provides the inside scoop on who's scanning, what attracts them, and why these connections are revolutionizing the way people interact.

Key Takeaways Include: 

• For the first time ever, we are now processing over 7 million scans in consecutive months

• Users scan over 3x per month on average, a 22% increase from a year ago

• Female scanning tends to skew higher towards younger age groups

• Scanning from tablets has increased by a whopping 1300% from a year ago

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Mobile moves incredibly fast. Keeping pace with both the technology and consumer expectations presents unique challenges and opportunities. Data on mobile usage is helpful, but is by its very nature looking backwards instead of ahead to the future. This survey, released in July 2013, aspires to answer the qualitative questions that quantitative data simply cannot.

Here are a few key findings from our first study:

• 1 in 4 smartphone owners have a local news app installed.

• The TV Broadcast is still the primary choice for receiving local news content, as voiced by 47% of the survey population.

• On-air promotion is the single most important driver of app awareness and downloads, receiving 41% of responses.

• Apps trump websites for the second choice for local news content.

• Consumers prefer apps for breaking news, and tablets for reading content.

• For a paywall to succeed, a local media company must deliver very unique content.