Have you ever wanted to serve your digital ads on a prospective customer’s phone when they visit your competitor’s location? With geofencing you can make that happen.
Geofencing is an extremely targeted digital marketing tactic that can be useful for advertisers when they want to reach customers in specific geographic locations. In this blog we are will go over the basics on this digital tactic and provide some examples of how it can benefit your business.
What is geofencing?
Geofencing is a location-based marketing tactic that serves display ads to your target audience when they are in specific locations on their mobile device.
With geofencing you can pin point specific locations to target like conferences, areas surrounding your business locations and even your competitor’s locations.
- For example, if you are bringing a new festival to your area and are looking for ways to build general awareness, you could use geofencing to target people while they attend a similar festival nearby.
How does geofencing work?
Once you select your desired locations to target, a virtual fence is drawn around that area. Targeting information, behavioral data and demographic data is then layered on top of the virtual area to ensure you are serving ads to your desired audience or prospective customers.
Once a targeted user enters this virtual area, they are served your ads on their mobile device. These ads can be banner ads that appear on websites or apps where targeted users are actively engaged.
How do you see conversions with geofencing?
Conversions for Walk-In Traffic: If your goal is to bring customers to your physical business location, you can track the foot traffic you generated through geofencing by creating two virtual fences. One fence is drawn around the targeted geographic area to serve ads to your custom audience, and the second virtual fence is drawn as a conversion zone around your business location to track customers who were served an ad that come to your business.
- For example, if you are a local restaurant looking to increase business, one virtual fence could be set up to target the surrounding area by serving ads, and the other would be set up as a conversion zone to measure how many people actually came to the restaurant.
Clickthrough Conversions: With Clickthrough Conversions you can measure how many people saw your ad, clicked on it and then completed a conversion. Conversions can be measured by a person visiting your storefront or through completing an action on your website. For example, if your business is conducted mainly online, your conversions could be set up for customers making an online purchase or submitting a request form.
Viewthrough Conversions: With this metric you can see how many people saw your ad, didn’t click on it, but still completed a conversion. This is a great way to measure top-of-mind awareness and the effectiveness of your ad messaging.
A couple things to note about geofencing:
- Geofencing will only work if a person has location services turned on.
- When using geofencing, you can save a mobile ID for up to 60 days. This is great to use for remarketing and to encourage people to return to you site once they leave your targeted area.
- With geofencing, there is an option to send push notifications to people you are targeting. However, this can be considered intrusive, and we don’t recommend this type of ad for every client.
At Compass Media we can work with you to start your next geofencing campaign. Contact us to set up a free consultation.
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