Delivered on March 24, 2025

"Azira Solution" by Macagua Co., Ltd.

Takeshi Yamamoto, CEO

Affiliation and position information is as of the time of distribution

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The Location Data Solutions Catalog is a tool that covers the entire location data business.

The LBMA Japan website lists a wide range of services offered by member companies.

We spoke to Azira, a US company, about their solutions, which Macagua provides as their general agent in Japan. A major feature of Azira's solutions is that they collect and organize people flow data from overseas and within Japan on a single platform. They can also meet inbound demand by collecting and analyzing movement data from overseas to Japan and vice versa.

We asked about the appeal of targeted advertising and analysis services that take advantage of this strength, and how they are used in a variety of fields.

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Four solutions that utilize Azira's strengths

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Macagua is developing the solutions of Azira (formerly Near), a US location data company, for the Japanese market.

Azira's greatest strength is its ability to collect, organize, and utilize people flow data from all over the world on a single platform.

This technology, which can grasp people's movement data from overseas to Japan and from Japan to overseas, can be a powerful weapon for inbound measures.

Just as Google organizes and provides search information, Azira visualizes and analyzes people flow information based on smartphone GPS data. It has provided this information in a variety of forms to companies and local governments.

When Azira decided to withdraw from the Japanese market at the end of September 2023, Macagua was launched to take over its services and serve as the general agent for Japan.

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The services that Macagua provides as Azira's solutions can be broadly divided into four categories.

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The first is "targeted ad delivery service".

This is a core product that Azira has been offering since its founding in 2012. It analyzes "what kind of people are visiting what places" based on people's movement data and past visit history,

and realizes targeted advertising.

Azira has a POI database of restaurants, hotels, tourist attractions, commercial facilities, etc.,

and combines it with user movement information to profile detailed behavioral history on an individual basis.

This enables extremely accurate advertising operations.

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The second is "advertising effectiveness measurement".

Rather than simply click-through rate or number of impressions, we focus on whether people who actually saw the ad visited that place = the impact on real behavior.

Azira measures whether the user ID that came into contact with the ad actually visited the place or the surrounding area that is the target of the campaign

through smartphone location information.

After the ad is delivered, the user's movement is tracked and KPIs such as visit rate and number of visits are visualized.

By clarifying the performance of the measures, it can be used for designing future campaigns.

The third service is to make more effective use of this profile data by linking it with the customer's CRM data.

Client companies are asked to provide only key information, such as anonymized IDs used within the app, rather than information such as the user's name or contact details.

Azira then compares and matches the ID with its behavioral database and provides the company with the profile information of the corresponding user.

With this system, in addition to information that companies can grasp on their own -- for example, "visited the company's store," "registered as a member," or "has made a purchase" -- the company can also grasp behavioral trends, such as what actions the user is taking outside the company's store, such as "which areas they are traveling through" and "what other stores they are visiting."

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Detailed behavioral analysis made possible by abundant overseas data

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The fourth is an analytical solution using big data on people flow.

Azira has an extremely unique data infrastructure on a global scale,

currently collecting people's movement data from over 200 countries around the world. Each time a signal occurs, it records it.

The total number has already exceeded 1 billion IDs, of which about 95% is overseas data.

This information has become a huge movement database, or so to speak, "point cloud data."

By utilizing this data, it is possible to analyze traces of movement and detailed behavioral history for a specific tourist destination, for example.

The ability to handle such comprehensive people flow data on a single integrated platform is a major feature,

and it is currently attracting a lot of attention as a solution for the travel and tourism industry.

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Azira's strength is the abundance of data on foreign visitors to Japan, and in the latest survey, it was found to cover about 30% of visitors to Japan who have visited Japan.

It is possible to perform insight analysis that includes inflows from not only Japan but also overseas,

and it can be used for inbound strategies, tourism measures, cross-border e-commerce marketing, etc.