The short answer
Display geofencing is $9 per thousand ad impressions. Social is $17 per thousand.
That's the rate. Almost every page you'll find on this search term says "contact us for pricing," so let me just answer it and then show you how those two numbers turn into a monthly budget.
How we get from a list of locations to a real number
The rate only means something once you know how many impressions you're buying, and that isn't a guess.
Before I send anyone a proposal, we build the strategy first. We take every location you want to fence and pull how many unique mobile devices have actually been at each one over the previous 30 days. Not an estimate of how many people live nearby. A count of devices we've already seen at the specific buildings you named.
From there the math is the same every time:
Forty impressions per device over 30 days is the number I build to. It's enough frequency for somebody to register who you are without burning the audience out.
A real example
Say your locations forecast at 1,000 devices over 30 days.
That's a live geofencing campaign for $360. One thousand real people who were physically at the places you picked, seeing your ad about forty times over a month.
Scale it however you want. Ten thousand devices is 400,000 impressions and $3,600. The math doesn't change, and neither does the rate.
Social costs more and is usually worth it
Social is $17 per thousand instead of $9. Same formula, higher rate.
Reach behaves differently there. People share the ads and comment on them, so you get organic extension display simply doesn't produce. The CPM is higher and the effective value per thousand tends to run better than the gap suggests.
Whether you run display, social, or both is a strategy question, not a budget question. Both use the same captured audience.
Addressable geofencing is priced differently
If you're targeting a list of home addresses rather than buildings, we can't pull a device forecast first. There's no way to know in advance how many phones are inside any given household.
So we price it off the address count instead. Same 40 impressions, same $9 CPM:
That's 5,000 specific households, targeted individually, not a radius drawn around a zip code and hoped for. More on how addressable geofencing works here.
What moves the number up or down
How many locations you fence. More buildings means more devices means more impressions. This is the biggest lever you control.
How busy those locations are. A regional airport and a single dental practice forecast very differently. Neither one is wrong. They're just different-sized audiences.
How long the flight runs. The 40-impression standard is built on a 30-day month. A two-week burst around an event is a different shape of buy.
Display, social, or both. The $9 and $17 rates are per channel.
How tight the fences need to be. A building in an open lot is easy. A suite inside a busy mixed-use block takes more care, and a fence drawn loosely to make the device count look bigger isn't doing you a favor.
What a small budget actually buys
Run the math backward and a modest monthly number covers a few thousand devices at full 40-impression frequency. That's a real audience from a handful of well-chosen locations, running consistently, with enough frequency that the people in it recognize your name by the end of the month.
What it doesn't cover is a whole metro. Spread a small budget across every device in a city and nobody sees you enough times to remember you. Narrow beats broad at every budget, and it matters most at small ones.
The honest version: below a certain point the reach gets too thin to tell you anything useful. I'd rather say that on the call than take the work and have you conclude geofencing doesn't work.
There's no minimum and no contract
No minimum spend. No contract length. You control the budget month to month, and if you want to stop, it's paused within 24 hours.
Clients stay because it's working, not because they signed something.
What to watch for in someone else's quote
- A flat monthly fee with no impression count behind it. If nobody will tell you the CPM and the forecasted device volume, you can't tell what you're buying.
- A device forecast with no methodology. Ask where the number came from and what window it covers. "Devices seen at these specific buildings in the last 30 days" is an answer. "Estimated audience" isn't.
- Preset fence shapes. If the fences are predetermined hexagons over an area rather than shapes drawn around your target buildings, your CPM is buying a lot of people who happened to be nearby. That's the most common reason a geofencing campaign underperforms.
- No answer on measurement. Cost per thousand is meaningless if nobody set up a way to see what the impressions produced.
Want the real number for your locations?
I'll run the device forecast for your actual locations. About 15 minutes, no pitch, and the strategy deck is yours whether you buy anything or not.