Benefits of Mobile App Geo-Targeting Revealed

Featured article by Jessee Christen, Independent Technology Author

How many times have you heard someone saying: “He was at the right place at the right time.”? It can be applied to bountiful spheres of life. In soccer, we’ve all witnessed commentators using this phrase to describe the situation where striker used the deflection to send the ball into the back of the net. Being in the right place at the right time usually makes all the difference between success and failure. We will focus on the significance of this phrase in the digital world in this article. 

What is geo-targeting?

We are living in an era where almost everything is digitalized. The latest technological advances allow people to save dollars by finding the exact audience that will be interested in buying/using the specific product they are selling. This is done by geo-targeting.  It is the most advanced way of advertising. It reaches customers by using their location data to adjust the ad and messaging in the most suitable way for their behavior and locality.

Who uses geo-targeting?

Companies from most industries are forced to adjust to this approach as it brings much better results. Especially high regulated markets such as gambling in Golden Nugget Online Casino use geo-targeting to comply with local laws. Gambling is not popular or legal in all territories of the world. You thus do not want to advertise casinos in countries like Iran or Syria. Selling casino services is much more profitable in the United Kingdom. There are so many examples to describe the array of businesses that use geo-targeting. A hairdresser can advertise his/her salon to people who are within five miles of the shop’s location. Such an approach would significantly improve the success of the ad. If the ad went to people across the country, a vast majority of them would just ignore it as they have tons of salons that are much closer to them. 

Geo-targeting benefits regular people too

We are living in a time when 81% of US residents use smartphones. These highly-developed devices offer users so many options. Geo-targeting is one of them. The owners of mobile phones can employ location services for their apps and most of them do so to narrow the range of the ads that can reach them. This way, people will only see ads relevant to them. The location plays a massive factor in determining relevance.  

Let’s take an example to show how regular people can take advantage of the system. You have downloaded the food delivery app. Thanks to the fact your location is visible to the software, you will only see restaurants close to your location. The same goes for car mechanics, dentists, and a whole range of small businesses. 

Three main targeting tools

How does the whole system work? Geo-targeting software (or app) detects someone’s location by using GPS or cell towers.  It then utilizes the information to decide what exactly to show to these users. The software uses three significant tools to target. 

– Audience Targeting
– Location Targeting
– Weather Targeting

Audience targeting selects users who have bought a certain brand or visited a specific location in the last six months (for example). It engages demographics data to use behavioral targeting and then creates custom audiences.   

The location targeting provides companies with additional information on the users’ behavior and habits when they are in certain places. As the name suggests, mobile location targeting helps businesses adapt their advertising campaigns based on people’s location. There is also a geofencing technology that enables companies to promote their services to users who are close to the target location. Geofence can be created by using coordinates and a surrounding radius.  

Finally, weather can also play a part in affecting the customers’ need for certain products or services. People will not buy umbrellas on sunny days. Nobody is interested in skiing during the summer. This is where weather targeting comes in as a handy feature.

To sum it all up, geo-targeting is a massive factor in the company’s marketing strategy nowadays as the whole system makes marketing campaigns 80% more effective.