Navigating Business Through Disruption: Addressable Geofencing

In part two of this four-part series, Navigating Your Business Through Disruption, let’s discuss how to use a programmatic targeting tactic known as addressable geofencing to adapt to the changing digital landscape. Since the COVID-19 pandemic began, most states have issued stay-at-home orders. This has undoubtedly shaped the way consumers interact online. We are helping businesses use addressable geofencing to pivot to this new reality. With addressable geofencing, our clients are seeing results such as an 125% increase in revenue and a 62% increase in clickthrough rates.

How Addressable Geofencing Works

People are obviously spending far more time at home than before the pandemic hit.  Pre-pandemic, we saw a rough average of five-to-six waking hours per day spent within the home on any given weekday, but now we are seeing that number increase to almost all waking hours spent within the home during the week.  This change in audience location lends itself to a certain programmatic targeting tactic: addressable geofencing, or AGF for short. 

AGF uses geofence capabilities centered on each individual street address through public property line records.  This means that individual houses can have their own geofence around them to capture the resident’s device IDs for ad delivery – but note AGF does not collect personally identifiable information (PII). For device IDs that include mobile, desktop, tablet, and connected TV, we can match user demographic and psychographic data targeting layers. Consequently, we can target households based on certain audience criteria or a brand’s qualifications. 

Let’s look at some scenarios where AGF targeting would be impactful:

• An E-commerce brand needs to target households that include women who have an interest in fashion and buying clothing
• A restaurant needs to target households that have used food delivery apps in the past
• A home-exercise brand wants to target households with gym memberships

Refinements based on location such as state, city, zip code, or radius bubble can also be applied to help focus the audience targeting.

After the AGF audiences have been built and implemented, how does this change in targeting tactics affect performance? Due to the spike in digital content consumption during the stay-at-home orders, there is an influx of inventory across websites, apps, and over-the-top (OTT)/connected TV. The influx of inventory gives brands more opportunities to reach their audience programmatically across many devices and platforms. The combination of increased digital inventory and increased digital consumption/engagement from users (e-comm retail therapy to cure boredom seems to be real), alongside the fact that many brands are pausing their marketing spend during the shifting landscape, has resulted in staggering results for brands who have been able to pivot their strategy and messaging to cater to the current situation.

Here are some metrics we have seen so far as a result from brands pivoting to AGF targeting in their programmatic strategy:

As brands look to shift budgets from out-of-home (OOH) media to digital media, programmatic display banners that create awareness through AGF targeting will be effective. Brands are also looking to shift budgets from more expensive traditional TV buying in order to capitalize on the less expensive connected TV inventory spike, in particular with the use of video ads. As a result, programmatic AGF will be an effective way to buy and deliver connected TV ads.

So, if a brand wants to:

• Change their strategy in order to adapt to changing audience behavior.
• Capitalize on new opportunities to reach audiences based on their location.

Then consider programmatic addressable geofencing.

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