Consumers are beginning to return to their normal habits of visiting stores, restaurants, shopping, and spending money. News broke last week that retail sales were up across the board, an indication that consumers are getting back to normal and hopefully we are seeing a light at the end of the Covid tunnel.
The U.S. Commerce Department reported that retail sales jumped 9.8% month over month in March 2021. This is also the best monthly jump since May 2020, when the first round of stimulus checks started reaching people. Moreover, on a year-over-year basis, retail sales grew 28%. Sales at restaurants and bars grew 13.4% as restrictions got relaxed and people felt more confident following the rollout of the vaccines. Spending on sporting goods soared 23.5%, apparel and accessories sales gained 18.3%. Sales at cars and motor vehicle parts dealers grew 15.1%. Also, gas station receipts jumped 10.9%, indicating that more people traveled.
With consumer confidence rebounding and people returning to stores and physical locations, it is now as beneficial as ever to look towards geofencing for audience targeting of ad campaigns. Geofencing is a rather common ad targeting technique but Manicz Media stands out in a few ways.
Create Custom Geofence Locations without Wasteful Radius Targeting
Typical geofencing ad targeting will develop a radius around an address or lat/long coordinate. These radiuses can be anywhere from miles wide down to a few feet. The problem is that most locations aren't round in shape so a radius can often overlap with surrounding locations that may not be desirable for a geofencing campaign.
Manicz Media utilizes custom mapping technology and geotagging to develop target locations that are drawn directly on a corresponding map. This allows for geofencing campaigns that are precise, accurate, and do not overlap with surrounding businesses and locations.
Create Audience Segments from Geotagged Locations
With a location tagged for geofencing, custom audiences can be built from the visitors of that location. Develop lookalike audiences that match the criteria of the actual visitors to a location including their demographic makeup, interests, income levels, hobbies, education, and more. These new audiences can be used to expand the reach of a campaign and help to deliver positive ROI for hyper focused and niche ad campaigns. Additionally, this method of audience development does not require any 3rd party cookies or ad tracking so there is little risk from the sunsetting of cookies down the line.
Geohistorical Targeting of Locations Visited in the Past 6-12 months
Manicz Media has leveraged location data derived from mobile IDs to develop an
accurate mapping of most popular locations including businesses, conference centers, vacation destinations, stadiums, restaurants, car dealers and more. With these locations tagged they begin feeding ongoing device location data and other non-personal identifiable information to the Manicz Media audience targeting platform. With this ongoing data feed available, advertisers can serve ad messaging based on previous historical data.
Reaching target audiences based on historical location data allows for accurate and relevant ad messaging along with known audience reach not often see with real time geofencing ad targeting solutions.
Foot Traffic Attribution and Visitor Analysis
Manicz Media attribution reporting delivers quantifiable insights on campaign response
by anonymously analyzing foot traffic at targeted locations against campaign audiences to measure visitation and paid media effectiveness. Respondents are reported by audience segment and location to support focused analysis for campaign optimization, measuring KPIs, comparing results for A/B tests, or identifying additional high performing audiences. Manicz Media provides custom reporting details, attribution on reports, and customer journey reports extending campaign measurement into the real world.
Additionally, audience persona reporting is available to showcase insights into who is visiting a physical location. These insights include age ranges, income levels, hobbies, media types most consumed and more. These audience insights can help to further optimize campaign targeting, creative strategy, and messaging approaches.
Consumers are looking to get back to normal. There is likely going to be a boom to all sectors of the economy as spending increases and people begin to emerge from their homes. Geofencing is a powerful tool for ad targeting and will play a significant role in ensuring the most engaged audiences are reached while limiting wasted ad spend.
Contact Manicz Media today to talk through ad targeting options and ways we can deliver digital messaging to audiences who are most relevant and engaged.