What is City-Level Tracking, and How Can It Benefit Your Brand?

When companies consider investing in brand tracking, they usually have a handful of important questions that need answering.

From standard ones, like — “Can I track brand awareness for my target audiences?” to “How long does it take to receive a new wave of data?” — to more complicated ones, we have answers for them all.

But one of the most interesting questions we are asked is: “Can you track data on a city level?” Our answer? You bet we can!

City-level tracking is one of Latana’s most interesting features because it allows us to not only gather more targeted insights but also to offer more accurate data. So, what is city-level tracking, and how does it benefit brands?

Let’s dive in.

What Is City Level Brand Tracking, & Why Do Brands Want It?

To be fair, the name is quite explanatory. City-level brand tracking is tracking consumer data for brands on a city-specific basis.

Keep in mind, most brands are only interested in the opinions and thoughts of certain consumers — very few brands can realistically claim that the entire general population is their target audience.

So, while it can be helpful to gather data on what the general population thinks about your brand, your target audiences’ perceptions take precedence. And for many modern brands, the target audiences in question reside in cities.

For example, let’s pretend you’re the brand manager of a new e-scooter brand, aptly named Scootie. For a variety of reasons having to do with efficiency and maintaining low operation costs — you only offer access to your brand’s services in cities.

After all, think about how incredibly difficult it would be to manage a fleet of e-scooters spread across a large rural area. That’s a lot of busywork.

So, when gathering brand tracking data, it follows that you’re not particularly interested in the brand awareness, understanding, associations, or considerations of rural consumers. Instead, you want to know how urban consumers in your target cities (New York, Boston, San Fransisco, Chicago, and Atlanta) perceive your brand by asking questions like:

• Have urban consumers heard of you?

• Is your brand awareness higher in some cities than in others?

• What are the main purchase drivers for urban consumers?

As a brand manager, this is all incredibly important data to get your hands on — as it allows you to make more informed, data-driven decisions when rolling out future marketing campaigns.

How Does City Level Tracking Benefit Brands?

Keep in mind, you don’t have to be a city-only brand to benefit from city-level tracking. Maybe you want to understand how your campaigns are performing in a specific region? Or perhaps you’re testing marketing efforts in one city versus another?

Whatever the reason, city-level tracking offers a host of benefits. In this section, we’ll discuss the top two reasons why city-level tracking is a great idea for brands of all sizes.

1. It’s great for hyper-local, city-focused brands

As we previously mentioned, city-level tracking is ideal for brands that only offer their products and services to specific areas — such as cities.

But, being a hyper-local brand had its pros and cons, especially when it comes to brand tracking. For example, let’s say you're the Head of Marketing for a hyper-local food delivery brand, called Snaghunt.

Currently, you’re active in three major cities in the US — Boston, San Fransisco, and New York — with no plans of expanding this year. Your product offering? You locate unused food and groceries from local restaurants or stores and resell it to local customers at a lower cost.

Because the food is fresh, you have a small delivery radius that only encompasses the interior of your three cities.

Now, if you chose to track your brand KPIs for the entire country, you would end up with a lot of useless data. After all, why do you care whether or not someone in Dallas knows about your brand if you can’t serve them?

In this case, you’d be smart to go with city-level tracking — that way you gather the data that actually matters to your brand’s growth and improvement. And if you decide to expand in the future, you can always increase your chosen regions to track.

2. It’s ideal for city-focused brand campaigns & allows brands to compare marketing efforts in different cities

City-level tracking is also great for brands that want to understand how their city-level brand campaigns or overall marketing efforts are performing.

In these cases, you don’t need to be a hyper-local brand that only serves cities — you can just be a brand that wants to assess the performance of city-specific brand campaigns or marketing efforts.

For example, let’s say you’re the brand manager of a UK-based streetwear brand, called Exte. While your products can be purchased online by consumers all over the country, your main target audiences reside in big cities.

Recently, you launched brand campaigns in five major cities — London, Birmingham, Glasgow, Manchester, and Leeds. The goal of your campaign was to raise brand awareness and to increase brand understanding — aka if consumers know what it is your brand offers.

To be able to understand how each city’s consumers feel about your campaign, you need access to city-level tracking data.

Therefore, when setting up your next wave of data, you schedule it to run shortly after your campaigns have finished in each city — that way it’s still fresh in consumers’ minds.

When the data arrives in your dashboard, you can then see how each city-focused brand campaign performed in comparison to one another. Perhaps your brand awareness increased by 1.2% in Birmingham but remained stagnant in Glasgow? Or maybe your brand understanding went up by 0.7% in London?

This kind of information will allow you to refine and improve future campaigns — as well as understand where new opportunities may present themselves.

Keep in mind, this example could also be used for a brand looking to compare overall marketing efforts in different cities. City-level brand tracking data has many uses!

Final Thoughts

At Latana, we are able to offer city-level brand tracking because we rely on demand-side ad platforms for API-powered sampling of real-time and non-incentivized respondents. With high precision targeting and a focus on quality insights, you can finally understand your brand tracking data at a granular, city level.

Want to learn more about what makes Latana unique in the brand tracking industry and see if it’s the right solution for your company? Feel free to book a demo with our Sales team.