G5 Search Marketing Adds Mobile Coupons to Local Marketing Platform

G5 Search Marketing Inc., a leader in local advertising and measurement solutions, today announced the addition of mobile coupons to its local marketing platform. G5’s new mobile technology gives local businesses the ability to track their customer conversions from where they originate online to the point of sale off-line.

In local markets, people search online and then pick up the phone or go into the store to complete the transaction off-line. The G5 Local Marketing Platform tracks the coupon redemption, using proprietary tracking technology, back to the advertising source where it originated online – showing you what ads turned into customers. This empowers business owners to “close the loop” and find which advertising campaigns are producing their most profitable customers.

“Local businesses can now see which advertising campaigns, be it from Google, Yahoo, Facebook or some other web properties, turned into customers,” said G5 CEO Dan Hobin. “They can also see which customers come from maps or optimized search engine listings.”

At SMX Expo, I briefly spoke with Dan Hobin. He gave the example of how mobile coupons are being used. One of his customers is a self-storage company. In May, earlier this year, when college students are nearly done with school, they need a place to store their stuff. Ads were placed on Facebook targeted at college students with a Summer Special. Students had the ability to print out the coupon or send it to their phone. Most chose to send it to their phone and then show the merchant their phone to redeem the coupon.

What We Think

There has been a lot of hype about mobile coupons. It’s 2008 and we’re still using a modified version of SneakerNet to pass things from the PC/Web to mobile! But this appears to be a more clever implementation for coupons, instead of pulling coupons from a mobile initiated search. Will other ad networks or internet marketing firms provide the same capabilities? Let’s wait and see.

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