Spotzot Powers Groupon Coupons

Spotzot has expanded its mobile ad platform that lets brands connect with consumers when they’re near a retail store and ready for a shopportunity. The company says that it’s now distributing coupons to Groupon.

The platform, which serves some 200,000 mobile offers per day, delivers sponsored coupons or offers from paying clients, as well third-party coupons that it aggregates from a variety of sources. The service delivers this mix of offers to approximately 50 shopping apps, now including Groupon.

Its proprietary location technology allows it to deliver relevant coupons to consumers who have opened a shopping app and are near a retail location that has offers.

“Our unique technology buys on location; we know within milliseconds exactly where that consumer is and whether we have a deal for that consumer close to where he is,” says Pehr Luedtke, chief executive of Spotzot.

That combination of location, as reported by a consumer’s mobile device, and intent, as evidenced by someone launching a shopping app, can increase in-store sales and improve advertising return on investment (ROI) by up to 15 times, according to the company.

“People, when they see these deals, click on them and redeem them about 10 percent of the time,” says Luedtke, who adds that his company is trying to “save retail. We can use a lot of what’s great about the Web – personalization and targeting – to drive in-store sales.”

Spotzot charges for sponsored offers on a pay-for-performance basis, and the action could be click, conversion, or impression. Customers include Express, Staples, and Aeropostale. While the company doesn’t have access to merchants’ point of sale or actual sales data, Spotzot makes its claims based on information retailers share about things like the average value per order combined with its own performance data.

The company does offer its customers analytics about shoppers’ locations. Spotzot can tell a national retailer things like redemption rates by location, or what areas contain concentrations of heavy couponers. For its brand customers, who may pay Spotzot to deliver their coupons when a consumer is near a retail store selling the brand, the company can show which retailers are driving sales via coupons.

While the bulk of the coupons and offers currently being fed into shopping apps by Spotzot are aggregated, rather than paid, the company hopes to get its share of the $15.7 billion that BIA/Kelsey expects to be spent on mobile ads by 2018.

Image via Shutterstock.