And How to Avoid Making those Advertising Mistakes
Leveraging data collected from geographic zones of interest is a great way to step up your marketing and advertising game. It allows you to serve up timely and personalized content to warm leads, giving you a bigger return on investment.
However, there are some common mistakes you can avoid when setting up your mobile geofencing and subsequent ad campaigns based on the data you collect.
1 | Excessive or Limited Coverage
In order to get useful data to utilize in your ad campaigns, you must first ensure that you have properly set up your geofencing parameters. It is important that you aren’t overly broad in defining your areas of interest. By defining too broad of an area, you will set yourself up for wasting a lot of money getting an ad in front of people who have a low probability of making a purchase.
On the other end, you also don’t want to limit your defined locations of interest too narrowly. This can cause you to miss out on potential new customers. One way to maximize your reach without being overly broad is to include your competitors’ locations. Because you are reaching out to people who are already interested in what you have to offer, this allows you to broaden your target audience without wasting money.
2 | Not Using Frequency Capping
Consumers are exposed to thousands of ads every single day, which means they can get overwhelmed and begin to tune them out. To avoid ad blindness, be sure to place a frequency capping parameter on your ad campaigns. This limits the number of times an ad will be displayed to a particular prospect. Not only does this ensure that you aren’t wasting money on ads that consumers are beginning to ignore, but it also keeps the user experience positive. When a person gets annoyed because they are seeing too many ads from one brand not only do they begin to ignore the ads, but they also will think negatively of the company overall.
3 | Not Using Exclusion Lists
When running an ad campaign, it’s important to keep in mind who your target audience is. If you are running an ad with the goal of turning new prospects into customers, you don’t want to show that ad to your loyal customers. For example, using an exclusion list can help you avoid showing ads to people who recently made a purchase. 
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4 | Using it for Only One Cause
Don’t sell yourself short by using your geofencing data to only run one ad campaign. As tempting as it is to promote just one sale you are having at the moment, doing so limits the return on the investment you made in geofencing services and data. It’s always important to run multiple and simultaneous ad campaigns with different goals. For example, you can have one ad campaign that gets new customers in the door, one that remarkets loyal customers and one that shows off a new product or service, all running at the same time.
5 | Know the Expiration Date
And finally, it’s important to know when a particular ad campaign has run its course. Be prepared to change up your ads frequently to keep people interested. Like with frequency capping, people will begin to ignore an ad they’ve seen too many times, even over a longer period of time. So change up your graphics and copy or start a new campaign with a new goal.