A BIA/Kelsey report published in 2015 estimates the location-targeted mobile ad revenues in the US to grow from $6.8 billion in 2015 to $18.2 billion in 2019. The researcher believes that location-based advertising has been a primary driver of mobile advertising growth. After struggling for a while, geolocation services provider Foursquare has finally figured out a sustainable business model and is on the way to profitability.

Photo Credit: Esther Vargas/Flickr.com

Foursquare’s Offerings

New York-based Foursquare was founded in 2009 by Naveen Selvadurai and Dennis Crowley as a social media site to let friends know about places that the user had “checked in” to. Soon Foursquare expanded its offerings to help consumers connect and share their experiences. Foursquare has two key apps for its consumers. The Foursquare City Guide allows consumers to discover new places based on recommendations from their community. Foursquare Swarm is a gamification-enabled check-in app that lets users earns points, rewards, and gaming titles based on their usage.The consumer apps have been well received in the market. More than 50 million people use Foursquare City Guide and Foursquare Swarm each month and it recently surpassed more than 10 billion check-ins. It sees an average of 9 million check-ins a day on Foursquare Swarm.

Foursquare also helps enterprises address location-based advertising through the Location Intelligence technology. The service lets brands locate, message, and measure their own consumers. It assists developers and enterprises by offering hosted technology and data to build context-smart, location-aware apps. It is powering location data for the likes of Apple, Uber, Twitter, Microsoft, and Samsung.

But its biggest evolution in the recent years has been in the development of other enterprise-focused services like Pinpoint, Attribution and Place Insights. Pinpoint is a digital advertising system that helps brands target consumers based on where the consumer goes. Attribution helps advertisers analyze the performance of a digital message. Place Insights can place users at locations even if they don’t check in and thus allow organizations to provide recommendations to users and foot traffic information to organizations. It used its technology to predict the number of iPhone sales that Apple would make through foot fall in the stores and how weak Chipotle sales were going to be. The tools were clearly well made as the forecast was surprisingly accurate. The accurate predictions also helped bring the spotlight back on Foursquare.