I had a client ask about Geofencing for ads.
Traditional Geofenced ads are sometimes thought of when you enter a very small area, like entering a restaurant, park, stadium etc. Once you enter into that area, you get very specific ads targeted at you. Usually this is when you download an app for that business and maybe enter their store, they know you’re a customer since you have the app. Or you have the Ticketmaster app on your phone and enter a concert arena or sports stadium. In other words the potential customer needs to both have the app on their phone and agree to be tracked, which many people decline.
This can work fine if you have that targeted a customer. But often advertisers don’t want to target just people download their app and enter their store, they are leaving out alot of other potential customers who didn’t do either of these. So can Google or Facebook Ads be used with very targeted geographic parameters? Yes!
In doing a few tests, with Google Ads you can geotarget as small as 1 mile around any location. This actually can work fine for most locations, unless its a super concentrated area like New York City. This way you can target not just people who have your app but anyone who goes into that 1 mile radius. And if it is a more populated area, you can also layer demographic and audiences to shrink the people who see the ad. For example, you could target 1 mile around a football stadium and also show the ads to only people interested in the NFL to promote home games or apparel, etc. Or only people of a certain age and gender.
Pro Tip: In testing in Google Ads, I wondered is 1 mile the smallest radius you can target. No, you can also switch the targeting to kilometers (km) and target instead of 1 mile, 1 km around the location. Please see the image to compare. So you can target that even more targeted area.
Notes: Please keep in mind that in many cases this is such a small area your ads may not get any traffic, especially if you add additional targeting, age, gender interests. But its worth trying out. Let me know what you think!
For Facebook Ads the minimum targeting is 1 mile, but you can shrink that down by adding additional targeting. You can get very creative, for example targeting people who have recently been in a location. Perhaps a sports stadium with tickets, or a resort in the Caribbean with vacation ads, etc.
PS- If you’re thinking this is all pretty cool but complicated, you’re right. If you’re not experienced with this you’ll spend all your money and have nothing to show for it. Always better to hire a pro who knows what they’re doing.