Despite all of the excitement around location based mobile advertising, the dirty little secret is that it’s tempered by the accuracy of the location signal… which is often wildly inaccurate.

Following our podcast with ThinNear founder and former CEO Eli Portnoy, we had the chance to catch up with Hilary Maitland at BIA/Kelsey NATIONAL last month to discuss the firm’s latest Location Score Index.

“When an app creates advertising calls, they can [report] location to however many decimals of accuracy they want,” said Maitland. “That location can come from multiple sources.So if you want to be accurate, you have to understand where that location data is coming from and is it actually where you’re stated.”

More importantly we looked at a few ThinkNear case studies of what can be expected when location is done right. There are clear performance deltas between good and bad practices. This follows our similar discussion with xAd’s Dan Hight about what some of those best practices look like.

The video is embedded below and we’ll have lots more on this topic in ongoing coverage of location-based mobile advertising.

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In all the excitement around mobile local advertising, most location based ad impressions are way off their intended target. This is according Thinknear, whose new Location Score Index, is the topic of our latest podcast interview with founder and GM Eli Portnoy (embedded below).

This is a message we’ve been hearing for a while (see “10% problem”), but is quantified further in Thinknear’s report through testing user-reported locations versus ad-network reported locations. The difference between the two — scaled to a sample of 53 million impressions — was revealed.

— The overall mobile industry scored 49 out of 100 total points for location accuracy

— 67 percent of industry ad requests included latitude and longitude data

— 34 percent of ad requests with location data were accurate to within 100 meters of the user’s true location

— 45 percent lift in mobile time-on-site metrics for campaigns leveraging top tier location data

— 30 percent to 51 percent lift in store visitation rates fore campaigns leveraging top tier location data

Excluding some of the leaders in location based ad targeting (see our post yesterday about xAd), these faulty location impressions are mostly coming from larger ad networks that are latching on to the excitement around location targeted ad relevance.

This is a double edged sword as we discuss in the podcast: The interest in location targeting is growing among advertisers… a good thing. But many publishers and ad networks are opportunistically filling that demand by “inferring” lat longs from less reliable means like reverse IP lookups.

This is a big deal, as it hampers the true performance of location based ad targeting. As we’ve been saying for years, genuine location targeted ad strategies can boost performance and return on ad spend. It’s also great for mobile publishers who can see higher premiums on their ad inventory.

But the disingenuous practices being uncovered by Thinknear’s study degrade the value of this ad inventory over time, and give location targeting a bad name. We covered this closely in our mobile ad attribution white paper and the conversation continues this week with Eli.

The post BIA/Kelsey Podcast: A Conversation with Thinknear appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.