The rapidly growing field of location-based services is causing most businesses to make room for location-based advertising in their immediate and long-term mobile marketing budgets. According to one research firm, it will be to the tune of $1.8 billion spent on location-based campaigns alone in 2015.

Last week’s launch of Facebook Places has so far raised awareness of start-up check-in services such as Foursquare, Gowalla and Loopt. Other location-based start-ups gaining a lot of attention include Shopkick, an iPhone app in which consumers are rewarded for visiting specific store locations. Even Google has just announced that its mobile advertisers can now use multiple addresses with location extensions, a new feature of Google Maps to ensure that customers on Android devices can get the proper addresses for businesses with more than one location.

Location is where it’s at, and an ABI Research study forecasts that advertisers will be spending nearly $2 billion trying to capture it in five years. The free ABI report examines the current dynamics of the location-based market and presents Web marketers and retailers the keys to building a strategy for geo-targeted ad campaigns. Included among those strategies are the three sets of technologies that enable location-based ads, with a combination of GPS, Wi-Fi and Cell-ID usually proving to be the most successful.