Over the last four years, I have explained to over 1,000 clients the difference between Adwords and Mobile Geofencing.
Adwords is a great tool and now has the ability to geotarget a location and place ads in mobile apps. Adwords has made a strong splash in mobile marketing.
One of the issues Adwords has is that it needs a lot happen in order for the mobile impressions to be delivered to the correct demographic in the right geotarget. A trained Adwords agency can pull all the right levers and make this happen but there’s a small room for error. One error and impressions can be delivered to a location thousands of miles from the target. The feedback can take days and Adwords doesn’t report in real time.
Google is always changing their algorithms and one day a cost per click may be $1.00 then it is $2.00 then back to $.80. A dedicated Adwords agency can manually track and change the cost per click on at least a daily basis to ensure your total pay-per-click rate is reasonable.
Mobile geofencing is clean. The geofence is set around a location (lat-long). Then tags all the Smartphones in that location. A filter can be put in place to target the desired demographic (age and gender) or behavior. There is a 1% chance of the wrong demographic seeing your ad. When the tagged user leaves the geofence they will continue to see the ad and their phone IDs will be placed in a retargeting folder for future campaigns. Mobile campaigns can change locations, creative and goals in 24 hours.
The big differences between Adwords and Mobile Geofencing boil down to that mobile geofencing has:
Robust Retargeting – the ability to capture an ID of a targeted user that clicked on the creative or saw the ad (impression) and then retarget the user after they leave the geofence.
Real-time – You can track a program in real-time and check on the click rate. If the click has gone dangerously low you can make changes or shut the campaign off and reaccess.
Behavior Overlays – Target by age, gender, hobbies, type of car you own, shopping preferences and many others. When you download an app you are giving permission for that company to download a tremendous amount of your personal information. So basically your are opting into a mobile program.
The mobile world is running fast. And (I’m not kidding) new abilities are happening almost weekly. So if you are big Adwords user you are in good hands. But you may want to set some money aside and start a few mobile geofencing.
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John Flynn is CEO of Copley Advertising. He has been seen in Forbes, Business Insider, Slate and other publications. Copley Advertising uses programmatic buying, retargeting and optimization (app click, time of engagement, operating system whitelist). To learn more about geofencing please email: [email protected] or call (617) 651-2249.
