Chad Bingle, Director of Media here at Mediavision2020, sat down with Jarrod Davis and the 8th & Walton crew to talk about how to strategically develop a geofencing media campaign. Listen to the full podcast conversation or grab the notes below!

 

 

Basic Elements of Geofencing

• Targeting location: Geofencing is targeting people based on their location, typically that of their mobile device
• Area: A geofence is simply a defined area on a map: circle or polygon, and anyone inside that geofence is your target audience. That basically translates to a set of coordinates
• Size: A geofence can be any size, but is typically most effective around a specific building or within a section of a building (like a section of a store).

Geofencing Isn’t Just One Technique, It Has Many Facets To It

• Unique Functions of Geofencing
  1. Real-time advertising (in geofence now)
  2. Retargeting advertising- really effective for when you want to build a custom retargeting audience where where they have been in the recent past is a salient layer of data.
  3. Attribution & analytics
• Context for Geofencing
  1. Shopping: in-store & conquesting
  2. In-home: individual devices or entire households
  3. Lifestyle: Concerts, Sports Events, etc.
  4. B2B: Offices, Conferences, Trade Shows
• Reach: Device vs Cross-device & Household

Common Geofencing Mistakes to Avoid

Everyone geofences, but all geofences aren’t created equal. There are a few red flags to watch for when crafting or evaluating a geofencing plan.

• Irrelevant or Missing Call to Action. If you’re going to go through the effort of targeting, make it worth it. Just pushing information/impressions: not having anything relevant at that point in time. A conquesting campaign should have a robust, exclusive offer that’s time sensitive. If you’re a CPG company, your geo-retargeting campaign should try to engage shoppers while they’re between grocery trips and planning their list.
• Wrong timing: Doing real-time by default when retargeting would make more sense
• Too broad of targeting: Just b/c location targeted doesn’t mean you’re relevant.
  1. Targeting an entire area around a big box store where everyone is there for different reasons, for example.
  2. Location isn’t always enough to reach the right audience.
  3. Layered data for better relevance (think: data sandwich)
• Measurement: What’s your goal? If geo-conquesting, did you drive click-to-call actions or visits to your store? If you’re influencing consideration, did you run a controlled test and see positive comparative sales for your test group within a given timeframe? While geofencing can be challenging to measure with accuracy, it’s possible to at least measure it consistently and do it in a controlled test.

When Geofencing Is Right, When It’s Not The Best Fit

When it’s right:

• Location = relevance: When your geofenced actually helps you reach your target audience in a meaningful way, where location = relevance, not just coincidence
• Conquesting (goal of growing share): lower ROAS requirements, open to aggressive approach
• Influencing consideration, offer exclusive content or offers
• Enrich targeting of current behavioral campaigns or complement other media tactics like search and behavioral.
• Bridging ecommerce and in-store through retargeting

When it’s not the best fit:

• Bottom-funnel: Goal of immediate lead gen or sales gen with a lower CPA
• Location = Irrelevance: Location is not aligned to intent
• No value added, nothing unique about reaching them through location targeting