We’ve identified a glitch in the global digital advertising matrix. And it’s a glitch that ties to a new word in our vocabulary – geo-rasterization.
This is affecting everyone in our digital ad industry from data providers, to ad servers, publishers, and DSPs, like the ones January Spring buys and bids on for you and your advertisers.
Geo-rasterization is one of the go-to-data sources for location data. It is one of the ways all smart marketers build and execute on geo-fences and conversion zones. To group location data, many data providers use this process. The process groups location data into a close proximity grid pattern on a map. In other words, geo-rasterization creates clusters of data points on the map to build geo-fences. Clustering helps to ensure we, and all others in our industry, maintain an individual’s privacy by not pinpointing down to an individual device. We target a group of devices that are in a particular area, rather than just a single device.
Here’s the glitch. This grouping has blown out a key tenant of our geo-fencing prowess, accuracy to an area as small as eight feet. In some cases, the geo-fences are clustering too many devices and inflating the number of devices we can see in a particular geo-fence or conversion zone.
GEO-RASTERIZATION
Our team monitors every campaign under our management (10s of 1000s), every week. We noticed this anomaly early in August and started reaching out to our data provider and DSP partners right away. This isn’t impacting all campaigns nor all geo-fences.
A fix is underway by the data companies in our industry that use geo-rasterization. We anticipate the issue will be addressed within the next 30 days. For your advertisers, we are addressing the handful of impacted campaigns and working directly with those sales teams. We are pausing inflated geo-fences and monitoring the number of foot traffic conversions that are tied to those fences. We continue to track foot traffic up to 30 days after a geo-fence expires, so we anticipate seeing inflated conversion numbers for impacted geo-fences through September.
Once the fix is in-place, those data providers have committed to retroactively cleaning their data and pushing it back through the ad servers and DSPs across the digital ad industry. When that happens, January Spring’s reporting will reflect the corrected, accurate conversion zone counts and geo-fence data.
We take our jobs seriously. We know how important every campaign is to every salesperson and every advertiser. In an ever-changing industry like digital advertising, it’s important to have a team in your corner, watching out for you. We’ve got your back.