New York’s busi­ness world is to have a new play­er after Seat­tle-based loca­tion ana­lyt­ics start­up ‘Placed’ raised $10 mil­lion and decid­ed to open an office in the Big Apple.

From loca­tion-based ads to store visits

Since its launch in 2011, Placed has been steadi­ly build­ing a rep­u­ta­tion as a lead­ing light in the world of mobile ad intel­li­gence. Last year, it launched Placed Attri­bu­tion, a plat­form that tracks whether local­ly served mobile ads actu­al­ly end up in per­son­al vis­its to a vendor’s bricks-and-mor­tar store. You don’t need to be a sea­soned tech prod­uct man­ag­er to appre­ci­ate that this bridges the online world with the offline, phys­i­cal world. And since it also lets brands, agen­cies, ad net­works and pub­lish­ers know whether peo­ple actu­al­ly make pur­chas­es upon vis­it­ing the store, it gives one of the most com­pre­hen­sive insights into the con­nec­tion between ads and offline behav­ior available.

Placed Attri­bu­tion is based on the startup’s cen­tral prod­uct, Placed Ana­lyt­ics, which uses a pan­el of 175,000 opt­ed in users to map local activ­i­ty, iden­ti­fy trends and work out which groups are most like­ly to vis­it which retail­er (it cov­ers no few­er than 175 mil­lion con­sumer loca­tions). Even the most bat­tle-hard­ened prod­uct man­ag­er would agree that that’s an impres­sive reach.

Along­side the new fund­ing, which brings Placed’s total invest­ment to $13.4 mil­lion; the com­pa­ny also announced a list of new pub­lish­ing and oth­er part­ners, includ­ing InMo­bi, Pan­do­ra, Rock­et Fuel and The Weath­er Chan­nel. Its Placed Attri­bu­tion plat­form has also been used by some big play­ers, includ­ing Mil­len­ni­al Media, Pay­Pal, Verve, xAd and Thinkn­ear (they get charged on a CPM basis once they plug the tech­nol­o­gy into their media campaigns).

Geofenc­ing rocks 

Accord­ing to the startup’s CEO David Shim, although geofenc­ing may count as con­ver­sions for peo­ple who’ve sim­ply gone into store, all the attri­bu­tion data col­lect­ed by Placed over the last year sug­gests that it real­ly works to dri­ve store vis­its (it’s “the clear win­ner in terms of tar­get­ing tac­tics in mobile,” he says). Clicks appear irrel­e­vant to the task of push­ing store vis­its – Placed data finds no cor­re­la­tion between clicks and store visits.

Shim firm­ly believes, though, that inven­to­ry, con­tent and cre­ative play sig­nif­i­cant roles in in-store conversions.

The New York office is due to open with­in the next two months.