This post is part of Genuine’s ‘Branding That Clicks’ series that is exploring the future of branding in a world of conversions, analytics, and ROI. Sponsored by Genuine.

The biggest problem with mobile ads isn’t the most obvious. Namely, that it’s a smaller screen. That’s a downside, for sure, making it all the more difficult to grab users’ attention. But the real problem with mobile ads is and has been that they do not allow for the same kind of tracking that is standard on the desktop web. If the screen is going to be small, display ads had better at least offer personalization and tracking. And in mobile that’s been lacking.

Advertisers want to know as much as they can about who you are, what you’re interested in, what you’ve already seen, and, later on, whether you made a purchase after seeing the ad. As Technology Review explained in an article earlier this year, that’s not been possible on mobile:

What works on conventional computers doesn’t on mobile devices, and in many cases replacements have not yet been developed. The standard method of tagging, tracking, and targeting online ads is the cookie, a small text file that websites store on a given computer’s Web browser that identifies it. But cookies don’t work as reliably or powerfully on the Web browsers of mobile devices, and there’s no such thing as a cookie inside a mobile app, where much of people’s time is spent and advertisers would like to follow.

Perhaps the biggest blind spot for mobile advertisers is conversion–whether you end up buying something. Not only are advertisers limited in what they can track on mobile, the purchase in question is quite likely not even happening on that device. As Derek Thompson wrote in The Atlantic in March:

But most people don’t shop on their phones. We research. You’ll look up a local lunch place, but you’ll pay for lunch at the restaurant. You’ll snoop around for great headphones, but you’ll buy them on your computer. How to you measure a successful “conversion” on a device that people don’t spend money on? How do you know what ad worked and what ad didn’t? It’s a challenge that requires a lot of creativity.

So are mobile ads doomed to opaqueness and low CPM rates? Not necessarily.

Advertisers are working hard to come up with ways to track you based on constraints set by Apple and others, and mobile has a key advantage that may ultimately increase its value: location.

Just like you might browse something on your phone, but later make the purchase on your laptop, lots of consumers research on their computers or mobile devices, and then make purchases in store. Advertisers would love to capture what impact, if any, the ads served online had on your in-store purchases.

That’s what New York startup PlaceIQ is working on, as a profile in AdAge explains:

The metric, which PlaceIQ calls Place Visit Rate, uses location data to illustrate what percentage of customers served a mobile banner ad for a retailer subsequently visited one of that retailer’s stores.

If that technology succeeds, it could dramatically increase the value of mobile advertising particularly for brick-and-mortar retailers. The fact is, web advertising has thus far been the outlier in terms of the data it can provide about customers. Huge amounts of money have been spent on TV, radio and print advertising where the ROI couldn’t be measured in the slightest. If mobile ads are going to command higher rates, it’s all about location.