Comparing IP Targeting and Geoframing

You can amp up your digital marketing strategy by targeting web users based on their IP address and physical location. IP targeting and geoframing provide unique access to user information and allow you to send customized ad content to an audience based on their web activity.

How Does IP Targeting Work?

With IP targeting, you can deliver personalized content to a website visitor’s mobile or desktop device based on the device’s physical location, which is determined using its Internet Protocol (IP) address.

You provide a list of physical addresses matched to specific networks. Ads are then served to people on the networks within that address list.

While IP targeting is a powerful targeting tool, it requires users to be connected to the network for ads to be successfully delivered. That means it’s most effective when targeting homes or employees of businesses who are likely to be on their organization’s network.

So, what if you want to reach people based on a certain physical location who aren’t connected to a network, such as your competitor’s customers or conference attendees?

Geoframing is the Answer

That type of targeting is called geoframing, and it takes IP targeting to the next level.

Here’s how it works:

1. Identify the geographic locations you want to target. You can focus your target area down to the square meter.
2. Choose a timeframe – down to the hour– that you want to use for targeting.
3. Digital technology captures the information of anyone accessing an ad-supported website or app’s mobile advertising device IDs (MAIDs) while in that designated location during the specific time frame.
4. The identified devices are then matched to the user’s home IP address.
5. Digital advertisements are served to any devices connected to that home network.

Geoframing opens unbelievable opportunities to access audiences based on where they’ve been.

Here are some examples of how this digital marketing strategy is employed:

• Are you unable to attend an industry conference but want to track the audience that visited the event? Target all the attendees of that event.
• Use digital ads to convince competitors’ customers.
• Remarket ads to people who visited your own business.
• Recruit employees by targeting your competitors, trade schools or universities.

When using geoframing technology, you can filter out matches based on how frequently the audience member visits a location. For example, if you want to hire nurses from local hospitals, you can narrow the target audience to only include people who visited those locations several times over multiple months. That effectively filters out patients who may have been in those locations for only a few days.

Other Advertising Opportunities with IP Targeting

While IP targeting and geoframing are the more common types of digital marketing strategies, there are other effective digital advertising tools.

Those include:

• Digital canvassing: Identify and engage neighbors of recent customers by turning canvassing into a digital process. Enhance your geographic advertising reach by using mapping and IP targeting technologies without knocking on doors or passing out flyers. Digital canvassing is based on a list of customers who’ve received a service or purchased a product in the past 30-60 days. You can use that list to identify and serve ads to your customer’s neighbors.
• Digital new movers: Deliver advertisements to people through every stage of the moving cycle, including those who listed their home, those under contract and those who just moved.
• Digital-to-direct mail: Engage anonymous website visitors who are already interested in your brand by matching their online activity through an IP address to a physical address. That enables you to retarget customers who visited your website with direct mail.

Contact the team at TouchStone Digital to learn about our IP targeting and geoframing capabilities.