When a potential homebuyer walks into a model home, they become a “serious buyer” — as a builder, how can you connect with this high-value audience at the right moment? The answer is geofencing, a powerful digital tool that allows you to target serious buyers with digital ads as a way to increase foot traffic.

Although it may seem impossible to keep up with new digital opportunities as they present themselves to our industry, geofencing is one worth understanding! We’ve had major success in driving the right buyers to builders by implementing our highly targeted local geofencing strategy.

How we do it:

1. First, a virtual geo-fence is traced around an area you want to target (i.e a competitor’s model home). This is called your target zone.  
2. We then draw a virtual geo-fence around the location you want to drive foot traffic to, such as your model home or design center. This is called your conversion zone. 
3. When someone visits your target zone, we capture their mobile device ID using precise GPS coordinates. Smartphones are constantly tracking our locations, even when our phones are not actively being used. In recent years, the GPS data sent from mobile devices has significantly improved and is now down to a 1-2 foot margin of error, increasing geofencing accuracy and thus performance. 
4. Once we capture a device in your target zone, we start serving them ads on their mobile device, as well as their other devices via our cross-device targeting capabilities. These ads can be traditional banner ads, HTML5 animated display ads, native ads, video ads, and even connected TV!
5. When an individual enters the conversion zone with their mobile device and has previously been served your ad, we recognize that user and count their visit as a conversion. This foot traffic data allows us to report on the effectiveness and reach of your geofencing campaigns.

FAQ: “How do I know these people weren’t going to visit my model anyways?”  Lift is a new geofencing metric that helps answer this question. Lift tracks devices in the target zone that were served ads, as well as those in the target zone that were not served ads, and then compares them. A 300% lift means that those served your ad were 4 times as likely to convert vs. those who were not served your ad.

Ideal cases for geofencing:

• Competitor’s model homes
• Sales centers
• Parade of Homes
• Open houses
• Event targeting
• Apartments (target first-time buyers)

Want to leverage this technology? Reach out to Group Two’s digital team!