In yesterday’s post, we talked about Place Based Remarketing, and on Thursday we talked about hyperlocal ads. You can learn more about it from our product page here. As we define geo-behavioral targeting we see that it is an extension of hyperlocal advertising.
Geo-Behavioral
Geo-Behavioral is kind of amazing. Behavior is the complete set of actions you take. When you define them as a whole behavior defines you. Online behavioral targeting lets us see what you’re interested in based on the products you purchase and the pages you visit online. That’s why our set of 93k audience targeting parameters are so powerful. Geo-Behavioral targeting is the same, but based on where you go in the physical world, and sometimes filtered with demographic and online data.
On the flight back from the Modern Marketing Summit on Spirit Airlines I spoke to a man who is a counter terrorism expert and speaker. He asked how often I fly, and told him about 10-15 times a year. Later in the conversation he let me know he is a frequent flyer – 10-15 times per month. Since he lives in Santa Monica presumably he flies most time out of LAX.
His geo-behavioral profile is definitely in the bucket of Business Travelers. This is one of 27 pre-segmented targets that looks at where you go in the physical world over time. There are tens of thousands of custom targets that we create for advertisers.
When I have an advertiser who wants to reach business travelers we define a custom set of geo-behavioral targeting recipes to setup. We look at the data for people who go to the local airport, LAX in this case, and query the device IDs that we see, and how often we see them, and where we see them. When we see my friend from the plane entering and exiting LAX 10-15 times a month he’s characterized as a business traveler and served an ad. Who may want to reach these people?
- Tumi – selling leather laptop travel briefcases
- Boingo wireless – internet access subscriptions for travelers
- Every major airline
- Hotel chains
- Credit cards
There are tens of thousands of custom targets that we create for advertisers based on combinations of brand affinity, age, household income, gender and parental role, all of which are informed by the places you go in the world. Brand affinity data is powerful because it targets people by the places they shop and how often they go. Whether you’re into Sketchers, Sam’s Club or Sherwin Williams we can target you across the US, in the towns you live in, with custom messaging that invites you to shop based on the places you shop at regularly. This means that we can target people who walked into a Toyota Dealership yesterday with ads for Honda. The possibilities are staggering.
Connecting Site Visitors To Physical Address
Through the use of IP matching we work with clients to define who exactly is visiting a website. The IP matching framework reads the IP address of anonymous site visitors and links it to zip+4 areas. This means down to about 3-6 households. This data is matched to 350 million unique devices across 90+% of the geographic US. From there we’ll send over a list of physical addresses that comprises your website traffic. Those addresses can then be targeted using the methods above. Further that IP data is used to define Facebook ID targets and email addresses which can be further filtered through partner databases for purchase habits, lifestyle and demographics.
Attribution
With all this fantastic targeting there we must define the very important question of attribution in geo-behavioral targeting. Using Foursquare’s solution we match foot traffic to a panel of 1.3MM opted in users who agreed to be part of the program by using Foursquare and Swarm apps. That panel data is delivered into statistically significant audiences mapped to the larger US population. We then compare groups of ad-exposed users from the panel to similar non-exposed users from the panel. This solution compares location visits to measure incremental lift. In other words, your stores have 30% more foot traffic because you advertised. Moreover, these measurements have the ability to understand Return on Ad Spend based on in-store purchases.
Placed does something similar, although the panel size is smaller. Users opt-in to have their location tracked in exchange for perks on the Placed app. They also ask users survey questions about the products they may have purchased at the locations they were in.
Hyperlocal, Place Based Remarketing and Geo-Behavioral ads comprise the holy grail for location based advertising solutions. They play a big role in the way marketers reach audience, and they are a boon for enterprise marketers looking for more precision ad targeting.
If you missed them here are Post 1 about Hyperlocal and Post 2 about Place-Based Remarketing.
