Location based mobile ad company xAd this week continued its tradition of releasing data on the activity it sees on its network. This is well received in a still nascent mobile ad marketplace that’s hungry for data and proof points of what’s working.

Its new (free) report takes a retrospective look at the biggest trends we’ve seen in 2013, and particularly in the retail vertical. Indeed, mobile has collided with shopping if our writings on this blog and white papers are any indication.

Some of xAd’s highlights also include a few things we covered in our recent atttribution report, regarding location based ad targeting. This includes not only growth in the adoption of location targeting but increasingly advanced forms of it.

The combination of location and audience attributes is a key point as it adds dimensions of relevance that are exponentially more valuable than location alone. This shines through in xAd’s new tagline: “The intersection of Places + People.”

As we’ve argued many times, combining location with audience targeting also makes the former more salient to brand advertisers because it speaks their language: they’ve been segmenting audience for years. This is just a more precise version of it…

Overall, the share of xAd’s advertisers that are adopting location targeting does indeed continue to ratchet up. These shares aren’t necessarily representative of the broader market (given other networks with less location focus) but directionally notable.

xAd’s influential research in the area of “Path to Purchase” is also invoked in the report. In concert with our friends at Telmetrics and Nielsen, the P2P series series tracks the evolution of consumer behavior to search and transact locally.

In the interest of time, I’ll refer you to the full report for the rest. There’s lots of good data on category segmentation other telling data.  We’ll keep a close eye on these quickly moving trends, especially as they align with our own data.

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