Location based advertising is a relatively new phenomenon that has started to grow by leaps and bounds with the emergence of the smartphone. As millions of people now use smartphones on a daily basis, marketers can take advantage of this fact, and serve them ads based on where they are. This has the potential to help advertisers make the most of their limited ad budgets, and reach people right where they are. While mobile advertising can be effective, the medium has some inherent challenges that companies have to deal with.
Potential Issues
One of the problems that comes with location based advertising is that it usually doesn’t reach that big of an audience. In order to get an ad in front of someone, that person has to be on a mobile website or on a specific app while they are in a geographic region. Many people in that region who might want a product or service, may not have their phones up looking at them at the right time. Even if they do, they may not be on a mobile website or the right app that can show them the ad.
Another potential problem with mobile advertising is that it usually works best for products that can be sold spontaneously. For example, if you are marketing for a restaurant, this can work because people who are hungry will be looking for food. However, if you sell furniture, not that many people are going to spontaneously buy a couch. You have to sell the right type of product to make it work.
Mobile advertising can also be a problem because it does not take into consideration the person who is looking at the ad. For instance, if a retirement home used mobile advertising, many of its ads would go to people who are younger than 30 years old, and would not need the service that they provide.
Fixing the Problems
If you want to make your mobile ads work better, you should use predictive-analysis advertising. This predicts where people will be based on their past habits. You should also base the content of the ads on user interests and behavior. This will help increase the conversion rate of the advertising much more than simply targeting an ad based on location.
Using location-based advertising does have some potential, but it needs to be used effectively. Otherwise, you might end up throwing a lot of money away for no reason.
This is a Guest Post written by Samantha Peters, an avid blogger writing about various tech topics from Contract Logix to the latest Google updates related topics.
This post came across my feed today. It is a little old I realize, but I would just like to point out that Location does not have to be limited to geofencing and the like. You can (and should!) be using location as a bid multiplier to modify your campaign adspend, whether mobile OR desktop. As they say, “location is the new cookie” and increasingly services are using geolocation to tie offline factors to online factors to boost advertising ROI.
Check out this 2min video to see how we do it at Predicative: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVRIwJr15do