Geofencing with Adwords?

[Scott ClientClicks]

One of my clients wants to be able to target a certain building and then trigger display ads to people who visited that building. I haven't played with geofencing before and was wondering whether anyone has experience with that technique in Google Ads or other paid ad platforms. From what I can tell, Google Ads only lets you location target down to a longitude/latitude with a 1km radius. Is that the best you can do in Google Ads or are there other tools that let you set a more precise geofence to a building? The 1km radius, in this case, covers about a 15 blocks which is most of downtown, so it's not really what they are looking for.

 

[Phil Rozek]

@Scott ClientClicks, I don't think there's a way to get that focused in AdWords. A 1km radius is as small as you can get.

You can probably Google Beacon to push ads. Even if not, I assume you can have the beacon trigger an event that you use to trigger retargeting ads in AdWords.

 

[Yan Gilbert]

Can you put an exclusion area in Adwords? If so, maybe you can set your km radius and then set up exclusion areas to cut into the original area you chose to make it smaller.

 

[Phil Rozek]

@Yan Gilbert, you can. But because you can't exclude by radius, you'll either have to exclude specific cities, counties, or ZIP/postal codes. Pretty clunky, and you still might not get just the shopping-mall-sized area you want to target.

 

[pbarnhart]

There is MacGyver method for doing it on Facebook (see an example in the Facebook section). Otherwise, you need to use a targeting provider like simpli.fi or propellant.media. There are a limited number of effective self-service options. What is your budget?

 

[Scott ClientClicks]

I watched the video about geofencing from Propellant Media. They have a white label program which sounds interesting: https://www.propellant.media/white-label-reseller-geofencing/ The video does confirm that you can't yet geofence in Adwords - at least not to the contours of a building. Propellant does say that they have a way to geofence, but it's primarily to app-based display ads on these networks and not to browsers.

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I've got a demo scheduled to learn more. It does sound like a promising service that us agencies could offer.