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G5 Search Marketing adds mobile coupons for tracking

G5 Search Marketing Inc., a local advertising and measurement service provider, has added mobile coupons to its offering to help clients better track offline consumer activity.

The mobile coupon functionality has been added to G5's existing local marketing platform. G5's new mobile technology gives local businesses the ability to track their customer conversions from where they originate online to the point of sale offline.

"Basically we have always primarily been a Web company," said Dan Hobin, CEO of G5, San Francisco. "Now we are letting people go online and send the coupons to their mobile phones.

"This is good for advertisers in terms of tracking, because unique coupon codes allow them to see exactly where the customer came from," he said. "This is the marriage of online and offline."

With the online channel, advertisers face the challenge of tracking consumers once they move offline.

Consumers who redeem products in-store using a mobile coupon will give advertisers insight into which marketing channels are working best for them.

G5 is a local marketing service provider. It helps advertisers gain visibility into what advertising efforts produce their most profitable customers.

As consumers shift from more traditional types of media consumption to the online world, there are significant opportunities to measure and improve the efficiency of local marketing and advertising.

The G5 Local Marketing Platform was developed to help manage the shift from traditional to online advertising. It measures what works and optimizes to the sources that provide the best return on marketing.

"Local is different than online and so it is hard to track what's going on in the store as opposed to when a consumer buys online," Mr. Hobin said. "We are connecting the online world to the offline.

"People are not searching on their phones too much," he said.

In local markets, people search online and then pick up the phone or go into the store to complete the transaction offline.

The G5 Local Marketing Platform tracks the coupon redemption, using tracking technology back to the advertising source where it originated online, showing which ads were most effective in turning consumers into customers.

This system empowers business owners to close the loop and find which advertising campaigns are producing their most profitable customers.

"Businesses can now see which advertising campaigns -- whether on Google, Yahoo, Facebook or some other Web properties -- turned into customers," Mr. Hobin said. "They can also see which customers come from maps or optimized search engine listings."