What is hyperlocal targeting?
We throw out that term with reverence because it is such an immensely powerful tool for marketers big and small to deploy.
You may see some of these shown in our product pages, like here, but lets get into some granularity on the topic.
Hyperlocal is the umbrella term for three types of targeting that focus on where we go in the physical world. Timing is the best way of breaking out these ad targeting types:
- Hyperlocal – where the user is right now
- Place Based Remarketing – where the user was in the past
- Geo-Behavioral Targeting – targeting users based on sets of data that describe their behaviors in the physical world
Hyperlocal Targeting
This is simple, easy and immensely powerful. In the past it has been reserved solely for big brands because the data mining and technology needed to power this tech, but today we’re making hyperlocal available to small and mid-size marketers, while continuing to serve enterprise advertisers.
It fundamentally comes down to setting a geographic target as small as 50 feet, or as wide as several miles, and serving ads to people when they are on a mobile app with ads in that geofence.
The use cases are for restaurants to target customers of their competitors, for product makers to target people when they are actually in-store and ready to make a purchase. By setting a target on one of our mapping partners we serve ads to people.
For products being sold at Ralphs or Kroger we serve ads to people are shopping right now in the store as a way of reminding them to buy something.
For fashion products we target ads to high fashion clothing shoppers who are right now at Neiman Marcus and Bloomingdales.
For B2B solutions our ads are served to people attending a business conference. For example, there’s a Small Business Expo in Los Angeles next week, and our ads will blanket the people attending that conference. This works across industries as long as your target audience is gathering at a location.
If there’s a place where your customer goes that’s indicative of their buying habits and needs we can target that space in the physical world.
When the targeting is at least a mile we also incorporate Facebook ads. For local businesses we pinpoint a radius and serve ads to those users when they are on Facebook’s desktop site or mobile app.
The Mechanics Of Hyperlocal Targeting
When data is sent from your phone to our ad platforms we capture the device’s latitude and longitude, where the wifi signal is coming from, the IP address, the city, the state and even app registration data. Some of this data is more accurate than others, so we stick to a multi-step verification process looking at all aspects of the user’s location data. If the entire data stream doesn’t match the latitude and longitude coordinates then we exclude targeting to that user.
Once we know the user is in our target we buy that ad impression, serve the ad, and identify characteristics of that impression, like the device type, the operating system, whether the user clicked.
That information gets stored and we then access that information for further analysis, reporting and campaign optimizations.
There’s so much more that marketers love us for, so in the next two posts we’ll talk about Place Based Remarketing, Geo-Behavioral targeting, discovering where your website visitors live in the physical world through IP analysis and attribution!
