Geofencing Doesn't Just Serve Display Ads

The misconception, stated plainly

Almost everybody assumes geofencing means one thing: a banner ad, on a phone, inside a building. Somebody walks into a stadium, their phone shows an ad for the restaurant across the street, and that's geofencing.

It isn't wrong so much as it's about a third of the story, and the missing two thirds changes what the audience is worth to you.

Where the wrong idea comes from

Two reasons, and both are understandable.

The first is the name. "Geofencing" sounds like something that happens at the fence. A boundary, a trigger, an ad. It implies a moment rather than an audience.

The second is that display is where the category started and where most agencies stopped. Programmatic display on the open web is the default activation. It's what most vendors sell, so it's what the word means to most people.

What actually happens to a captured audience

When a device crosses one of our fences, we capture an anonymized device ID and it goes into your audience.

That's it. That's the whole output of geofencing. Not an ad, not a trigger, not a notification. A list of device IDs.

Everything after that is a separate question: what do you do with the list?

The default answer is programmatic display, running across the open web on news, sports, health, games and apps. That works, it's cheap, and it scales. But the list isn't stuck there.

Social is the part that surprises people

We can take those captured device IDs and import them into social media campaigns. At roughly a 40 percent match rate, we can discover Facebook accounts, Instagram accounts, and LinkedIn accounts belonging to devices we saw at a specific physical location.

Read that again, because it's the thing clients react to most. You fence a conference. Two weeks later, the people who attended it are seeing your ads in their Instagram feed and on LinkedIn. Not people who look like them. The people who were there.

Four out of ten isn't everybody. It also isn't a small number when the input is an audience you hand-selected by location, and it means a single fence produces two campaigns instead of one.

Why cross-channel beats display alone

• Different attention, same person. Display on a news site is peripheral. Somebody scrolling a feed is looking directly at it. Reaching the same person in both places is a different experience than reaching them twice in the same place.
• Social creative does more. Video, carousels, longer copy, comments, shares. Display gives you a 300x250 rectangle. For some audiences the creative format is doing most of the work.
• It extends past the device. Display targets a device. A social account reaches a person across whatever device they're logged into.
• Frequency without fatigue. Forty impressions in one month on one channel is a lot of the same rectangle. Split across display and social, the same frequency feels like presence instead of repetition.

The tradeoff is cost. Social runs $17 per thousand against $9 for display, and tends to earn the gap, partly because people share the ads and you pick up reach you didn't pay for. Full pricing math here.

What this changes about planning a campaign

Plan creative for the channel, not the fence. One message for display, a different one for social, both pointed at the same audience.

Treat the audience as an asset. You captured it once. It's reachable for the length of the campaign, across channels. That's a very different thing from buying impressions in a location.