It’s 2018 and you, as a business owner, are inundated with offers and tools to grow your business in the digital arena. One of the newcomers on the digital marketing field is a method called geofencing. But just what is geofencing and how can you use it to grow your business? Webtivity Marketing & Design will endeavor to give you a solid grasp on just what geofencing entails and more importantly how to apply geofencing capabilities to grow your business.

What is geofencing?

Geofencing in definition refers to several different technologies whose main goal is creating a virtual perimeter around a specifically defined geographical area. There are several ways to enact a geofence with some methods requiring proprietary physical technology known as beacons to using GPS, Wi-Fi, radio frequency identification (RFID) or even increasingly social media tags. Once you have a geographical area virtually defined or geofenced, you can target users in this area with promotional offers or other types of useful client facing information.

Taking Advantage of Geofencing

The biggest draw to geofencing targeting for most businesses is the ability to lower advertising costs. Simply put your typical entrepreneurial business owner is not looking to compete with national or even statewide retailers. Instead savvy business owners look to reach the potential client that is nearby. This is in part what makes geofencing so cost effective, the ability to reduce competing voices, or ad dollars, to the minimalist of levels.

There is one additional benefit of geofencing targeting however that often goes overlooked. Geofencing can also be used offensively as well as defensively. Defensively it can help reduce the ad noise that most users experience on their various digital access points. As our world becomes overwhelmed with more and more information, it is becoming increasingly easier to target not only nearby potential clients but those close to competitors as well.

Getting started with Geofencing

Let’s get into the nitty gritty of the various methods you can use to take full advantage of geofencing for your own business enterprise. There are several advertisers or providers that use proprietary devices known as beacons to create a virtual geographical area using these devices. Unfortunately this usually involves considerable cost and upkeep to manage and is usually priced out of range for most small to medium sized businesses.

The relatively new method of geofencing uses established advertising platforms that have already done most of the leg work of crating geofences for you. These services such as Google Adwords and Facebook include features that target specific areas around you or your competitor’s business using GPS, Wi-Fi, mobile device location from apps and other methods that are collected by these big players. They then offer these options as part of their possible client targeting matrix.

Webtivity Geofencing Services

Webtivity Marketing and Design has been providing digital marketing services since 1999. From link building, to blogging, to website design and digital advertising, including geofencing targeting we do it all.

Have we mentioned that we are a Certified Google Partner Agency? Give us a call at 941-753-7574 or contact us for more information on how we can work closely with you to help your business achieve all of your geofencing and overall marketing goals!

The post How to Grow Your Business with Geofencing in 2018 appeared first on Webtivity Marketing & Design News.

We hear increasingly from potential clients they don’t want to use Google AdWords because “we did that for a while and all we did was burn through a bunch of money with no return.”  We have had great success leveraging AdWords for our clients so we know it can work–if done properly.  In order to “save money” businesses set up their own campaigns instead of hiring a trustworthy consultant.  While creating a few ads and putting your credit card on file with Google is easy enough for almost anyone to do, setting up your campaign and managing it properly takes years of experience and data analysis know-how.  We find there are four common themes that lead to businesses getting disillusioned with AdWords:

You Can’t Set It and Forget It
Running a successful AdWords campaign does require ongoing management.  Your competitors are constantly changing their bids, consumer demand changes often, Google changes the way AdWords works from time to time, and on top of all that you need to determine which of your ad campaigns aren’t working very well and either make changes to them or pause them altogether.  Most often the biggest mistake we see is businesses set up their account, throw a big budget at the campaign, and then they just let it run and run and run.  That’s a perfect way to get disappointed by AdWords.

Don’t Always Listen to Google
When you log into your AdWords account often you will see messages from Google telling you things like, “There are 83 keywords you should add to your campaign!” and other similar advice.  The common person thinks, “Since Google is telling me to do this I had better listen!”    But our experience often leads us to NOT listen to those automated messages that pop up when we log into an AdWords account.  Remember these are automated messages that are designed to try to be helpful, but you can’t treat them as gospel.

Tracking the Wrong Metrics
Another colossal No-No is to simply track “clicks” as your primary success metric.  It’s easy enough to get clicks–just set a big budget and target a bunch of non-qualified crap and you’ll get tons of clicks!  Will that get you business?  Heck no.  When clients bring their unsuccessful AdWords accounts to us we are almost always able to reduce their monthly ad budget as we optimize and tighten their campaigns.  On top of that we are tracking even more important metrics than simple clicks: how long people stay on the website once they’ve clicked on an ad; and even more importantly, whether they fill out a contact form or purchase a product once they got to your Landing Page.

Find the Right Partner
We have often been shocked and saddened by campaigns we see from other supposedly reputable companies in our industry.  Your AdWords account should be set up in YOUR name with YOUR credit card on the account.  That gives you ownership and non-restricted access to your campaign.  When you’re hiring a company to help with your campaign make sure they are asking questions about your products and services, the types of clients you want to target, the geographic areas you want to target.  They should be talking to you about the importance of remarketing campaigns, the importance of monitoring and improving your campaign Quality Scores, and most importantly they should be talking about how they will measure and track conversions using Google Analytics.  A click is great, but a conversion is what will make the campaign a viable marketing tactic for your business.

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Google recently decided to strip out all keyword data from organic non-paid search traffic. Here is how you can get back some of the that information by linking your Google Webmaster Tools account with a Google AdWords account, even if you’re not actively running AdWords Ads. 

1. First, make sure you already claimed and verified your domain in Webmaster Tools, which you should already be. Under the appropriate domain click the cogwheel in the top right corner and click “users & site owners.” If your email is not listed click the red “ADD A NEW USER” button in the top right and add your email with full permission.

2. In your Google Adwords account, click “My account” in the green navigation bar and then click “Linked accounts.” Under Linked accounts then click “Webmaster Tools” which should then present you with the option “Link new site.” Then add the domain that you have listed in Webmaster Tools, click continue, and then click request access.

3. Once you have requested access you should have a message under “Site Messages” in Webmaster Tools regarding a request from Adwords to import organic search data. In the message find the “Click here to approve or reject their request” and click the link provided, then confirm the approval.

4. Finally, in your Google Adwords account go to Webmaster Tools under Linked accounts and you should see your domain with the following image:

Once you have completed these steps your Google Adwords account has been successfully linked with Google Webmaster Tools, and AdWords will start collecting keyword data from organic impressions, and clicks. To view these reports, Choose the Dimensions Tab in AdWords, and select “Paid & organic”

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