Urban Airship Combines Location History, In-App Preferences With Push Messaging

Urban Airship, which provides push messaging services to mobile application developers, has announced the addition of sophisticated location-based services to their offer.

Urban Airship’s Location Messaging Service leverages location history profiles together with location data from Maponics (neighborhood boundaries linked with census data), Nielsen DMA (geofence around broadcast markets) and OpenStreetMap POIs.

In total Urban Airship offers 2.5 million pre-defined boundaries (geofences) for local targeting such as: City, County, ZIP/Postal Code, State, Country, U.S. School Districts, U.S. Voting Precinct, Federal/State Legislative Districts, Metropolitan Area, Time Zone, Nielsen DMA, Neighborhood and Hyper-local location boundaries such as stadiums, parks and major venues.

Marketers can combine these geofences (based on past and present location) with in-app behaviors and interests as well as user-controlled preferences to attain fine levels of precision in mobile message targeting.

Urban Airship said that a major sporting event using the new product with custom geofences of its facilities experienced at a clickthrough rate ten times higher than its usual emails.

This new service comes as a refinement to their “Location Segmentation Push Messaging Service“ that was launched at the WHERE conference last April (read more here).