Roughly 15 years since I started writing about digital marketing, I’m still amazed that large numbers of marketers still don’t fully understand the importance of location and location-based targeting. Over the past 18 months, chiefly because of mobile, things have started to change but location has historically been treated as a sideshow by marketers focused on capturing clicks.
National and brand marketers have regarded location and local search as something primarily for small businesses to worry about. The reality is that everyone who sells anything in a physical store or in the real world should be laser-focused on local search and mobile-location — either in the form of targeting or from an attribution perspective.
Even in the most aggressive scenarios, e-commerce and m-commerce represent a small fraction of overall U.S. sales. Officially, e-commerce is just under 7 percent of total US retail sales, per the US Census Department.
