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.