As advertisers and publishers seek ways to improve performance to compensate for shrinking budgets, new technologies like location-based advertising provide a means of improving relevance and response rates. Real estate site Trulia.com, and media company 1020 Placecast, have announced their partnership, using location information to target specific audiences for advertisers and deliver more relevant messages to them on Trulia.com.

Placecast adds a new dimension to audience targeting by using location information as the key to relevance. In Trulia’s case, the starting points are the real estate locations in which users express interest. Placecast’s proprietary targeting algorithms correlate these with dozens of other demographic, psychographic and geographic data points.

For publishers in categories such as travel, events, tickets, real estate, weather, classifieds and career search, Placecast uses the location information already present on these sites to target audiences and customize messaging. Improved performance results in a dramatic increase in the value of ad inventory for advertisers, transforming remnant ad space into premium CPM real estate for publishers.

One of the first advertisers to take advantage of this approach with Placecast and Trulia is Avis-Budget. Approximately halfway through a three-month campaign, Avis has seen its ads on Trulia perform strongly relative to other publishers. The Avis-Budget campaign is just the first of many in the expanded partnership between Trulia and Placecast.

Originally posted on November 19, 2008 @ 4:40 pm