The Top Uses of Geo Reporting You Might Not Have Thought About
April 04, 2018
Geo reporting or geographic reporting is not to be confused with location based targeting. Where location targeting allows you to segment your campaign spending within specific regions, geo reporting allows you to visualize performance of your campaign by region.
A programmatic platform that gives you a geo report (like ours) is providing you with campaign data across a number of Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s), depending on the region in which your target demographic is segmented. Acuity’s geo-reporting feature has extremely powerful use cases.
In particular, today we are going to discuss the top uses of this report. They are:
- Understanding geographic segment campaign performance, and
- Identifying high performance and potentially new markets of interest
Only Fish Where The Fish Are
Geo reports can help you to significantly increase the efficiency of your ad spending. When looking at performance data based on your KPI’s you can see where performance is coming from and make decisions regarding areas to focus on and, perhaps, areas to avoid. Just because you’re interested in a specific geographic region, doesn’t mean that region is interested in you. Advertisers can shut off areas they notice are underperforming to gain efficiency in spending.
Example. Imagine you are running a nationally-targeted campaign and – using geo-reporting – you find out that your conversion rate in New York is excellent, but you don’t see results from Florida. This information allows you to pump up your New York spend and cut back or eliminate ad spend in Florida.
Identify High Performance and New Areas of Opportunity
When analyzing a geo report based on campaign performance, you can see whether your campaign is resonating in locations you may not have expected. If you noticed this, you could make an immediate decision to better understand the high performance region and identify the reason your campaign seems to be popular there. Perhaps, there is an untapped market you never expected somewhere tucked in the map!
Example. Your designer shoe campaign went live with a wide net cast across the U.S. Results came back in the geo report and you expected to see the best performance in the 5 biggest cities, i.e. New York, Los Angeles, you know – where the fashionista’s are. But then you saw significantly higher performance in a small city in southern Texas – turns out a local star wore your shoes at a performance and everyone is seeking to buy them. You create a subsequent campaign featuring the Texan star!
Survey Says…
By carefully examining your geographic reporting, you can find the most efficient places to serve your ads and tailor creative to match potential customers in those local areas.
According to Google, a third of all searches are local. Local searches on mobile are growing 50% faster rate than searches on desktop devices. The more you can tailor a message that resonates with local tastes, the more likely it will be successful. BIA/Kelsey estimates location-targeted mobile ads will account for $20.7 billion worth of ad spend in 2018 and grow to $32.4 billion by 2021 – accounting for 45% of all mobile advertising spending.
In summary, we know that location targeting is a critically important tactic for digital advertising and will only continue to grow. As such, it will be critical for advertisers to work with advertising technology platforms that enable geographic reporting so that they can gain an understanding regarding whether or not these dollars are actually going to good use or not or how they could be better attributing their spend.
