Foursquare Unveils Pinpoint for Location-Based Ad Targeting

Foursquare has launched Pinpoint, a new ad offering aimed at assisting marketers in targeting users based on where they have been, using location data.

Previously, marketers were able to target its users on other sites and apps with a product it called Foursquare Audience Network (FAN). With Pinpoint, they can now use the company’s data to target non-Foursquare users across mobile and the Web.

With about 7.5 billion check-ins (as of March 2015) on Foursquare and its recent offshoot app Swarm, the company has collated highly accurate location information about where consumers have been. It was only a matter of time until Foursquare monetized this data to its full potential.

“We believe that the places you go are the best indicator of who you are and we can help marketers target the right audiences. Location is more than a latitude and longitude. We have six years of first-party location intelligence, which has created a map of the world the way your mobile device sees it,” says Steven Rosenblatt, chief revenue officer, Foursquare.

“Our snap-to-place technology filters out inaccurate location data, so that advertisers get only the precise places that their audience goes to in the real world,” Rosenblatt adds.

In order to ensure accuracy, Foursquare plans to partner with “a verified third-party ecosystem of apps, exchanges, and publishers” in order to gain access to consumers’ GPS locations. It will then compare this data to its own and use it to create “geo-shapes” to build profiles of consumers at scale. Marketers will also be able to use Foursquare’s Proprietary Place Attribution Report to quantify how effective their campaigns are in driving critical foot traffic into locations.

“We’re making sense of the relationship between people and places, so that brands can target more than just demographics. Marketers can create custom audiences at scale, using the psychographic data that they need, combined with the location data from Foursquare,” says Rosenblatt.

So far, Foursquare’s Pinpoint has already attracted the attention of a few notable launch partners, including Google, AT&T, Choice Hotels, Coors Light, FedEx, Jaguar Land Rover, Olive Garden, Samsung Galaxy, and Wild Turkey. The program will open up to other marketers in May.