GroundTruth is a media platform that turns real-world behavior, including location and purchase data, into marketing that drives in-store visits and other real business results. 42matters helps them ensure top-notch user experiences by streamlining mobile and connected TV (CTV) app identification for media buying and campaign reporting. In addition, 42matters enables GroundTruth to guarantee the quality of their app media supply. Keep reading to learn how!

GroundTruth at a Glance

GroundTruth is a media platform that helps businesses achieve in-store visits, digital conversions, and other real business results.

Launched in 2001, GroundTruth started as a voice enablement company operating under the name xAd. In 2011, the company completed a pivot to Search Engine advertising and began offering its customers a platform for serving ads.

In 2016, xAd acquired the location-based advertising company WeatherBug and formalized the relationship by rebranding as GroundTruth. Shortly after, in 2018, they launched an end-to-end self-serve platform specializing in mobile, location-based advertising.

Today, GroundTruth serves all digital media types, including social, mobile, display, connected TV (CTV), over-the-top (OTT), and digital-out-of-home (DOOH). They also deliver audience-based direct mail to drive in-store visits and real-world behavior.

Real-World Consumer Behavior for Targeted Advertising 

GroundTruth’s pitch is pretty straightforward. They use observed real-world consumer behavior (i.e. location and purchase data) to create targeted advertising campaigns across all screens for advertisers. They then measure how consumers respond to these campaigns, including whether they visit store locations or websites, to understand the quantifiable results of a brand’s advertising.

GroundTruth specializes in helping companies attract customers to physical stores and locations as well as achieve other marketing goals such as driving traffic to websites and more. To this end, GroundTruth works with several verticals including Retail, Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG), Restaurants, Travel, Automotive and more.

GroundTruth has its work cut out for it. Its competitors are a who’s who of demand-side platforms (DSPs). It competes with companies like The Trade Desk, Simpli.fi, InMarket, and Foursquare to win over brands and agencies that run digital advertisements and media and communications companies that resell media acquired from DSPs to their own customers.

Omni-Channel Problems for an Omni-Channel Platform

GroundTruth came to 42matters with a very particular challenge. As noted above, they serve digital media on numerous channels, including mobile and CTV apps available on Google Play, the Apple App Store, Roku Channel Store, and others. To facilitate ads on these channels, GroundTruth offers a media buying and full campaign reporting platform called Ads Manager.

However, due to various factors (e.g. idiosyncratic app store discovery algorithms, the way publishers manage their app inventories, etc.), app naming conventions are extremely inconsistent. For example, while the Sling TV app appears on Google Play as ‘Sling TV: Live TV + Freestream,’ it goes by ‘Sling: Live TV, Sports & News’ on the Apple App Store and ‘Sling TV—Live Sports, News, Shows + Freestream’ on Roku.

Indeed, despite offering the same apps across multiple app stores, publishers often use slightly different titles to boost discoverability via app store optimization (ASO). Making things even trickier, publishers adjust their app titles in accordance with different countries and languages and routinely tweak each listing to maintain visibility in app store searches. So, extrapolating these differences across hundreds of countries and languages and accounting for constant publisher optimization, it's easy to see how things can quickly get confusing.

For GroundTruth’s customers, these practices make it both difficult and time-consuming to zero in on the right apps to target in their multi-channel campaigns. They also inhibit their ability to automate app discovery and scale campaign operations.

GroundTruth + 42matters = Easy App Identification

Fortunately, there’s a simple way to circumvent this issue by using unique appIDs, which are easier to map across stores, countries, languages, and time. Unfortunately, GroundTruth’s customers probably have no idea that appID “418671597” refers to “National Geographic.” This is where 42matters comes into the picture.

To simplify app identification across their Discovery (for discovering places of interest), Console (for lite reporting), and Ads Manager (for media buying and full campaign reporting) platforms, GroundTruth uses 42matters to translate appIDs from perplexing number strings to simple, universal app names. This makes finding target apps easier, boosting overall user experience.

It also streamlines GroundTruth’s campaign reporting capabilities. Since 42matters enables Ads Manager to roll a variety of store-specific app titles into universalized app names, it facilitates comprehensive, multi-channel campaign insights with normalized data.

What’s more, improvements to app identification help GroundTruth control app supply quality. For example, if GroundTruth can’t identify an app by name, it’s tough for them to determine if the app meets particular brand safety standards requested by advertisers. With 42matters, they can more easily investigate apps and provide their ad partners with top-notch placements.

42matters Has Enabled GroundTruth to…

Create parity with their DSP competitors in the mobile and CTV space. With a focus on helping customers drive real business results, this additional layer of detailed reporting enables brands and agencies to be more transparent around their ad placements. In turn, this empowers them with a better understanding of the reach and impact of their marketing dollars.

In the future, GroundTruth will use 42matters’ app intelligence solutions to improve user experience even more. In particular, they intend to add app logos to their dashboards to enhance cross-platform app identification.