Location, location, location (tracking)

Location tracking, once widely viewed as a negative  regarded with a wide amount of consumer skepticism, now carries new and helpful features in the battle against COVID-19. The feature embedded in all smartphones and activated through usage of various app permissions, it can benefit through contact tracing, social distancing (showing heavily populated areas), digital marketing advertising and public health guidelines and decisions based on trends shown from aggregate data.

Within the past few weeks, tech giants Apple and Google have both contributed tools to the space.

Apple’s Mobility Trends leverages anonymous data collected from the native Apple Maps navigation to focus and look at how COVID-19 and the corresponding lockdowns have affected various modes of transport in comparison to a baseline measurement taken at the beginning of the year (January 2020). The company is updating the trend line daily with its private data. Outside of being used by public health officials to view the trend timeline, the data doesn’t seem to be broken down in such a way to be helpful for digital marketers to leverage or really even the layperson.

Source: Apple

Google’s Mobility Reports, also a recent release, finds itself to be a bit more useful than Apple’s foray. This platform breaks down location data over time across various buckets of location category which, though more in depth with the added location categories (e.g. retail, grocery, work), it’s confirming what we already know: no one is going to formerly populated areas such as restaurants and retail. However, this is highlighting and capturing consumer behavior versus the Apple platform which is seemingly more broad in scope and reporting.

In time, paying attention to these tools can and should give marketers and, people as a whole (no matter there profession), information as to when some semblance of normalcy will return and perhaps what the new “normal” will look like.