Foursquare was launched in 2009 as a local search and discovery mobile app, based on a user’s browsing history, the app makes recommendations for places to go near their current location. This technology was made possible by smartphones’ use of GPS, providing greater personalization for marketing. In 2014 Foursquare launched a new feature of social networking, allowing users to interact with friends using the heck-in’ feature and share their location by selecting a venue nearby.

Social media platforms have provided a new form of advertising, opening up the opportunity for businesses to market their products more directly. Writing an effective advertisement is one thing, but knowing what its impact is and whether the advert reaches its desired target audience is another. Foursquare’s partnership with TikTok aims to address this issue, combining Foursquare’s location data to TikTok’s advertising, providing metrics for businesses to see how effective their campaigns are.

Advertising Options

Mostly used by young adults with almost half of users aged between 18 and 24, TikTok has a huge market reach of over 1 billion users and offers the following advertising options:

· In-feed ads: created using the TikTok manager interface

· Image ads that run of TikTok’s news feeds

· Video ads: full-screen videos that are 5-60 seconds long

· Spark ads: boosting organic content from either the company’s or other users’ account

· Pangle ads: utilizing the Audience Network

· Carousel ads: up to 10 images with their own captions that run through TikTok’s news feed app

· Branded hashtags: campaigns that promote interactions, typically a 3–6-day campaign

With so many forms of advertising available, choosing which method –or methods– to employ is a huge challenge to businesses, even if they can identify TikTok as the best platform to market their products or services. Needless to say, the motivation for advertising is to make people purchase their products. Although sales figures provide useful indicators by correlating sales to the timing of campaigns, Foursquare seeks to go further than that.

Foursquare Measurement Product

Foursquare Attribution is Foursquare’s measurement product, which is being integrated with TikTok in the US and Canada. The new technique seeks to provide data on how effective advertisements are at drawing people into stores, focusing on metrics for businesses with physical locations. The hope is that data analysis will provide critical answers to advertisers, namely:

· The number of incremental visitors TikTok drives to a store

· How much needs to be spent advertising on TikTok to get one more customer to the store

· Which audiences are the most valuable to the business

Image via CrunchBase

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