JiWire Reveals Mobile Audience Trends About the Connected Shopper, Device Adoption and Public Wi-Fi Usage in its Q4 Mobile Audience Insights Report

SAN FRANCISCO, CA (PRWEB) February 28, 2013

JiWire, the leading location-powered mobile advertising and data platform, announced the findings of its Q4 Mobile Audience Insights Report today. This quarter’s report examines leading consumer trends such as location and mobile shopping trends, connected device adoption, as well as ongoing Wi-Fi usage habits. Key report insights include:

• Mobile connectivity is enhancing consumers’ in-store shopping experience.
• Showrooming may be less of a risk for retailers.
• Mobile Wallet adoption increased by 38%.
• Device proliferation continues to grow with tablets.

“Mobile has increasingly become the screen of choice as smartphones and tablets are becoming personal shopping devices," said David Staas, President, JiWire. "We're now seeing how mobile is influencing consumer retail shopping behaviors both onsite and offsite. This broad use of mobile is revealing tremendous insights into audiences, allowing brands, retailers, and advertisers to understand their mobile consumer in ways never before possible.”

Mobile Connectivity Influences How Consumers Shop:
Over the 2012 holiday season consumers revealed new trends in how they use their mobile device in-store, what they’re using it for and how it influences their shopping revealing audience brand trends, as noted with our comparison of Ann Taylor shoppers to Banana Republic patrons.

• Mobile wallet usage has increased 38% since Q1 2012 with PayPal as the leader.
• Women outrank men in seven mobile usage categories including price comparison, product reviews and searching for deals or coupons they can use for in-store purchases.
• People who shop at Ann Taylor are 7 times more likely to shop at Banana Republic while significantly less Banana Republic patrons shop at Ann Taylor.

Mobile Connectivity Influences Where Consumers Shop:
This past holiday season more and more retailers began adding in-store Wi-Fi as a value-add for their customers following the trend previously set by hotels and coffee shops. Our research looked at how connectivity influenced consumer behaviors revealing that there is serious value to retailers especially related to store traffic and in-store purchases:

• 80% of mobile consumers are influenced by the availability of in-store Wi-Fi when deciding where to shop.
• Shoppers 35-44 are the most influenced by in-store connectivity at 86%.
• The top four mobile usage activities reveal that shoppers are primarily using in-store connectivity to enhance their shopping experience.

Device Proliferation Continues to Grow with Tablets:
The Q4 Insights Report also revealed that tablet adoption continues to increase rapidly.

• Mobile tablet and smartphone usage on public Wi-Fi increased 53% in the last 12 months.
• 72% of tablet owners plan to purchase an additional tablet.
• Mobile consumers are more likely to connect to public Wi-Fi on tablets when they have more time to spend, like at airports and hotels versus restaurants and malls.

Consumer Demand for Public Wi-Fi Continues to Increase:
According to the research, Wi-Fi usage continues to grow, with distribution across devices continuing to shift to mobile, specifically:

• Smartphones and tablets now represent 58% of all public Wi-Fi usage, up from 38% in Q4 2011.
• 79% of the U.S. public Wi-Fi market is free or ad-supported.
• 84% of mobile consumers prefer complimentary, ad-supported Wi-Fi rather than paid Wi-Fi (8%) or paying for a higher speed connection (7%).

About JiWire's Mobile Audience Insights Report
JiWire’s Mobile Audience Insights Report is based on data compiled from three sources: a survey of more than 1,400 randomly selected customers across JiWire’s network of 315,000 public Wi-Fi locations, as well as the billions of advertising impressions from our combined Wi-Fi and mobile advertising platform. The report is based on data collected from Nov ‘12 through Dec ‘12. Quarterly public Wi-Fi location rankings and business model distributions are based on the final day of the quarter.

About JiWire
JiWire is the leading location-powered mobile advertising and data platform. Leveraging proprietary historical and present location data, JiWire enables advertisers to effectively engage their desired audience across all mobile devices at scale.

With the belief that audiences are defined by location, meaning where you go is the best indicator of who you are and thus an excellent indicator of intent, the company’s newly launched Location Graph™ is an innovative, proven approach to mobile advertising delivering custom audiences with 4x higher performance and greater efficiency over traditional mobile targeting or geo-fencing approaches.

JiWire was recently awarded Frost & Sullivan’s prestigious 2012 Best New Product Innovation Award for Mobile Advertising referencing JiWire as “One of the most accurate audience segment & profiling data sets in the industry.”

JiWire has been an innovative leader in evolving mobile advertising and delivering mobile audiences since 2003. Its data platform creates audience profiles from over 585 million devices and more than 7 billion data points, engaging more than 55 million unique users monthly across smartphones, tablets and laptops.

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