Despite all of the excitement around location based mobile advertising, the dirty little secret is that it’s tempered by the accuracy of the location signal… which is often wildly inaccurate.

Following our podcast with ThinNear founder and former CEO Eli Portnoy, we had the chance to catch up with Hilary Maitland at BIA/Kelsey NATIONAL last month to discuss the firm’s latest Location Score Index.

“When an app creates advertising calls, they can [report] location to however many decimals of accuracy they want,” said Maitland. “That location can come from multiple sources.So if you want to be accurate, you have to understand where that location data is coming from and is it actually where you’re stated.”

More importantly we looked at a few ThinkNear case studies of what can be expected when location is done right. There are clear performance deltas between good and bad practices. This follows our similar discussion with xAd’s Dan Hight about what some of those best practices look like.

The video is embedded below and we’ll have lots more on this topic in ongoing coverage of location-based mobile advertising.