xAd Launches MarketPlace Discovery, The First Ever Public Real-Time Foot Traffic Visitation Tool

NEW YORK, June 15, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- xAd, the global leader in location intelligence that drives sales, today announced the launch of MarketPlace Discovery, the world's first public, real-time location intelligence platform that provides actionable visual insights into foot traffic behaviors in the physical world.

MarketPlace Discovery takes store visitation insights to the next level, enabling brands to not only understand the factors influencing their own store visitation, but those of their competitors. This enables marketers to uncover opportunities to impact their businesses in near real time.

Take, for example, the recent breakfast promotion trend amongst top quick-serve restaurant brands. Through MarketPlace Discovery, marketers can see which brands are winning the breakfast wars based on actual foot traffic. The tool revealed that in June (on average), morning foot traffic into McDonald's was on par with or exceeded competitors' morning foot traffic, while brands like Subway and Wendy's lagged behind, highlighting a key area of opportunity for these brands.

McDonald's vs. Wendy's Foot Traffic by Time-of-Day, Average for June

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"The vast majority (90 percent) ¹ of retail commerce happens in traditional, physical stores, so brands need to understand what drives their customers to their own locations and those of competitors," said Shashi Seth, Chief Product Officer at xAd. "Unfortunately, assessing the connection of these complex variables with enough certainty to confidently act on them, has been nearly impossible given the available data. At xAd, our mission is to leverage the power of location to help marketers get to a better place by solving these types of industry issues—this is why we created MarketPlace Discovery."

In addition to time-of-day and day-of-week trends, MarketPlace Discovery shows brands where their customers are coming from to visit specific store locations. These types of insights provide brands with a better understanding of their customers and are incredibly valuable, however, have been difficult to uncover in the past. Through leveraging the power of location intelligence, MarketPlace Discovery is changing this, enabling brands to make more strategic and informed marketing decisions.  

Customer Origination to a Palo Alto Taco Bell

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"We're always looking for ways to stay relevant and connected with our consumers, so it's essential that we maintain a deep understanding of the habits and behaviors of the people who are visiting our restaurants," said Cheryl Gresham, Director of Media, Taco Bell Corp. "Through partnering with xAd, we're able to better understand their actual behaviors and can reach them with the right message in the right context. MarketPlace Discovery has the potential to be an essential tool in this process. We're intrigued with insights we've been able to gather thus far, and look forward to digging deeper as we evaluate how insights from the platform can be further leveraged."

MarketPlace Discovery is powered by xAd's proprietary Blueprints™ technology, which automates the creation of the most accurate place data based on physical boundaries of business locations. MarketPlace Discovery insights are derived directly from anonymized foot traffic data observed within the unique Blueprints (or physical geo-boundary) of each store location, collected from users across xAd's network of over 100k+ mobile apps. Through Blueprints, xAd sees a total of 325 million global unique users per month at nearly 100 million places and unique points of interest.

Today's initial release of MarketPlace Discovery, which is free and publicly available, features insights for top quick-service restaurants (QSR) and retail stores. A more comprehensive version will be available via customer login in the coming months. Through MarketPlace, xAd customers can leverage Discovery insights to create, execute and measure campaigns on one platform. Today, MarketPlace is still in beta with a full release expected later this year.

For more information about MarketPlace Discovery, visit: www.xad.com. The free and public version is available here (https://discovery.xad.com/) and can be accessed on both desktop and mobile.
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¹ Source: US Department of Commerce, Quarterly Retail e-Commerce Sales, Q1 2016

About xAd
xAd is the global leader in location intelligence that drives sales - unlocking opportunity in the 90% of retail transactions that are still completed offline.  By leveraging a mobile device's current or past location data, xAd can provide in-store visitation insights by market, brand and even by specific competitors.  It is through this first party data and intelligence that xAd can interpret the most relevant moments to introduce a brand's message, providing a more personalized and meaningful mobile ad experience to consumers while impacting the point of decision - driving in-store foot traffic and sales. Each month, xAd's patented location solutions help marketers reach unprecedented scale with access to over 500 billion meaningful mobile moments, 325 million people at nearly 100 million unique places and points of interest globally.  With xAd, marketers can finally close the gap between online activities and offline sales. Learn more: www.xad.com.  

xAd Press Contact:
Erin Lockhart
[email protected]

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