Life360, a popular family safety and tracking app, is getting deeper into the advertising and analytics platform business.
On Thursday, it announced its first location-based ad targeting solution, called Place Ads, and a foot-traffic analytics product named Uplift that measures store visitation.
The company has a portfolio of products built around tracking.
It’s widely used by parents to monitor their children’s whereabouts and is also known for its emergency service, which operates not unlike a medical alert button. The app can be set to alert family if it detects a potential fall or crash, and offers a “Watch me Fly” service, which sends a notification once a flight lands. Not to mention that Life360 owns tracking device company Tile, which it acquired in 2021.
The common theme here is persistent location tracking.
“You can’t use Life360 without always-on location sharing,” Brian McDevitt, Life360’s VP of ads, told AdExchanger.
Until recently, Life360 monetized almost entirely through subscriptions, but began testing ads in its apps starting roughly nine months ago, McDevitt said, which is when he joined the company.
The new Place Ads will enable more sophisticated location-based targeting across more media channels, he said, and include its first native ads placed in its apps. Life360 uses Google Ad Manager as its ad server.
One of its pilot partners is Uber, which uses Life360 to target people as they arrive in airports. The Life360 app, which knows when a person’s plane has landed, can then send a push notification promoting them to book an Uber ride. According to McDevitt, Life360 helped Uber book more than 100,000 rides during the first few months of testing.
The other new product, Uplift, is for real-world attribution. “We can basically draw a circle around any point of interest that you think is interesting to your brand,” McDevitt said.
A quick-service restaurant like Chipotle, for example, might use the Uplift product to measure whether ads served in a particular area generate higher foot traffic at its store locations.
By the numbers
Life360 has some major advantages compared to other location-based tracking services, McDevitt said.
Most other location data companies with store visitation and foot-traffic measurement products rely on “cobbled-together [data] from a bunch of SDK pings from a variety of different apps on your phone,” he said.
These vendors also sometimes rely on small panels of thousands or tens of thousands of users, which they feed into models. The Life360 app, by contrast, has 84 million monthly users worldwide, including 45 million in the US, who open the app five times per day on average. And all of them have given consent for location tracking to be turned on at all times.
What’s more, McDevitt noted that other location data services are very Android heavy, because the Android OS makes more identity data available to app developers and also makes it easier gain consent. But iOS users represent around 70% of Life360’s user base.
“That gives you a much truer picture of the market,” he said, “and what people are doing when they go in store.”
Sharing is caring
But what about the obvious question? People turn location sharing on in Life360 because the service requires it, not because they want their data used for ad targeting.
Since Life360 users are required to turn on location sharing – that’s the whole point, because an emergency at any time – the new ad targeting and analytics business could be seen as sneaking in ads via a Trojan Horse of sorts.
But that’s not the case, said McDevitt, who noted that anyone who uses any of Life360’s services receives a one-page sheet when they sign up that clearly states their data will be used for advertising and analytics purposes. The company hasn’t recently changed its terms or been required to gain new consents, like via Apple’s ATT consent notifications, because it doesn’t rely on the IDFA.
The company has very high ATT opt-in rates for iPhone owners because of how its services are used, McDevitt said. For most customers, the whole point is to monitor location data at all times.
Though there are also guardrails in place, he added.
Data from users under 18 is off limits for both targeting ads and location-based analytics. Life360 will also not geofence sensitive locations, including hospitals, clinics, schools and houses of worship.
But for Life360’s consistent tracking, “the insights that we’re capturing are different than what’s in the market today,” McDevitt said. “We really understand the unique picture of a family, and who’s influencing purchases at what stores.”
