Hello Business Owners! Every now and then I am asked, “What is Geofencing?” “Can we try out Geofencing?” The answer depends on what you are selling and how large your marketing budget is. If you are selling something that would interest anyone in the general public, and your audience is not specific to age, sex or demographic or job role, and you have money to layer a very broad campaign to your other efforts, than yes, maybe you would consider Geofencing. If you are specifically niched in the salon or salon suite industry like many of our clients are, you definitely wouldn’t want to spend money on an additional GeoFencing campaign and this is why. 

GeoFencing is mobile ads targeted using Geographic location the users mobile device is located in. There is no other targeting aside from where the device is physically located. The ads are display ads. Display ads are visual image or video ads, think pop up ads that pop up on the mobile device. This basically means your ad is shown on any mobile device in the targeted location. Think little kid with a tablet too.

The pop up ads are most often what we consider click bait. Click bait something you were forced to click on accidentally or attracted your attention in a devious way. The website the ad is placed on made money off your click. You were never intentionally interested in the product or service and it was completely unrelated to what the website or app you were visiting. 

Geofencing is not good at all for advertising something specific like salon services or salon suites for the following reasons:

-The targeting is not specialized to beauty professionals or women in an age range. The ads shows up on every random mobile android device.

-The ads are not placed on reputable websites and networks based on related interest, the ads are lots of pop ups for apps, and mobile games, basically think a pop up or ad you wished didn’t pop up that you were forced to click on trying to find a recipe or weather website etc or game app or the worst ever, Google phone pop ups. Apple has limited pop up ads so much off their devices that Geofencing ads mostly run wild on android devices nowadays. 

With that being said, display ads can be done the right way on respectable networks like YouTube, Social Media Sites, and Google ads partners, using reMarketing lists. For more on remarketing campaigns, stay tuned…