Geofencing vs. Addressable Geofencing: What’s The Difference?

Display ads and streaming video marketing campaigns can be powerful for driving a business’s ROI. Marketers can make them even more effective by layering in additional tactics, including geofencing and addressable geofencing.

Geofencing is the practice of using global positioning (GPS) to define a geographic boundary with a virtual fence to target consumers who visit a physical location. If a consumer who has their phone’s location services turned on and they enter the virtual fence, they will be delivered specific ads for 30 days after they leave the fence.

You should be strategic with the locations that you geofence. Typically, for a long-term strategy, it’s very effective to geofence your competitors and your own business if you get a lot of foot traffic in your location. For example, if you are a car dealer, most of the people who enter a competitor’s location (once we exclude employees) are in the market to buy a car. Those customers can be delivered an ad that encourages them to visit your dealership, and we can track those conversions.

Geofencing can also be used for short-term strategies. For example, a local pizza place may want to geofence the football stadium on game day to encourage customers to come for the pizza special after the game. An RV dealer may want to target attendees of an RV show with an ad that encourages them to shop the dealer’s great selection after the show.

Keep in mind that geofencing is a tactic that enhances a targeted display ad or video streaming campaign — it is not a marketing solution on its own. But the ability to target your competitors’ consumers with your ad and track when those consumers later visit your location make it a powerful tactic to layer in and track.

Addressable geofencing is similar, except you can target consumers’ homes using a mailing list or curated list, instead of targeting consumers who enter a pre-set virtual fence.

Addressable geofencing is another layer of targeting for a display or video ad campaign. It can also be used as a stand-alone tactic or to improve the results of a direct mail or email campaign when you are targeting specific households.

If your goal is to drive consumers to your brick-and-mortar location and you are targeting specific households, you can put a geofence around your brick-and-mortar location as a conversion zone for your addressable geofencing campaign.

The other major benefit of addressable geofencing is that, whether you are using an existing list from your customers or pulling a curated list, this is all first-party data. Campaigns that use first-party data typically have higher conversion rates than campaigns that do not.