When you are buying programmatic advertising, you need to know that not all programmatic platforms are created equally.  It is very easy to waste a lot of money using inefficient platforms that scatter-shot your ads or show your digital ads in places where your services are not available.  Geo-targeting and reporting are an effective way to increase the efficiency of your programmatic ad buys.  By making sure your ads are targeted in the right places, and by being able to track performance across both wide and narrow geographic areas, you can better optimize your spending to focus on areas that get results.

Geo-reporting can provide you data across a number of Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) broken down by geography.   This feature is particularly useful when analyzing available inventory across regions of interest, understanding geographic segment campaign performance, and identifying new potential markets of interest.

Advantages To Location-Based Targeting

Geo-reporting opens up a new world of data to help you not only create ad efficiencies, but also to find new market opportunities.  Here are some examples of what geo-reporting can do:

  • Find the best and worst performing locations

    Imagine you are running a nationally-targeted campaign and – using geo-reporting – you find out that your conversion rate in New York is great, but you aren’t seeing results from Florida.  This information allows you to pump up your New York spend and cut back or eliminate your Florida advertising.

  • Zero in on specific locations for custom advertising

    If you are a soft drink company, you want to tailor your message to the way people talk.  It’s called “pop” in most of the Midwest, but “soda” in California and New England.

  • Customize landing pages based on geography

    If you are a multi-state real estate company with homes for sale throughout the Northwest, when people in Seattle click on your ad, you want to send them to a landing page for the Seattle listings, not for those in Portland.

  • Adjust bids based on geographic modifiers

    A keyword that converts well in one area might not convert in another.  Perhaps two keywords perform equally well, but due to competitive reasons, there are significant discrepancies in the cost in different geographies.

  • Reduce overlapping ad spend

    Let’s say you have 20 retail locations within a city and each location does most of its business within a 10-mile radius of the store.  However, there’s overlap in the 10 miles around stores, which means you might be competing against yourself for the same keyword in geographic niche areas.

  • Reduce wasteful spending

    In your analysis of geo-targeting reporting, you can slice and dice data in many ways.By comparing the state or country results versus results on a city level, you may be able to target higher-converting cities at a lower price point than buying the entire state or country.

Target Local

By carefully examining your geo-targeting reports, you can find the most efficient places to serve your ads and then tailor creative to match potential customers in those local areas.  According a Google, a third of all searches are local.  Local searches on mobile are growing at a 50% faster rate than other searches.  That just shows that people are seeking local information, so the more you can customize the message to the user’s geography, the more likely you will be successful.That’s the reason why BIA/Kelsey estimates location-targeted mobile ads will account for $20.7 billion dollars worth of ad spend in 2018 and grow to $32.4 billion by 2021 – accounting for 45% of all mobile advertising spending.

As they say, “fish where the fish are.”