How to Define Geofenced Locations (Areas)
Summary
Fusio gives you unprecedented freedom in terms of geo-targeting options. Not only you can draw static geo-areas around lat/long coordinates, but you can now also target isochrones areas, catchment areas, and a mixture of the three!
You can refer to this article to go deeper into the detail of these features.
Thanks to our Geoaccuracy® filter, any bid requests from suspicious or inconsistent geo-coordinates will be discarded, leaving you with a quality inventory.
You can leverage this feature in your Tactic's Target Settings > Geography Module.
We will assume here that you have already created your Tactic (otherwise, please refer to this article).
STEP 1. Enter Target Settings
By default, your tactic will inherit the line's target settings (if any), but you will be able to overwrite them as it suits you from the Tactic Settings.
Now locate the Geography module.
STEP 2. Select Geofenced Locations
STEP 3. Select the Geoaccuracy® Level
By default, the Geoaccuracy® level is set to None, in order not to restrict the available inventory too much.
To define a specific area within which mobile users may be exposed to your ad, click Geofenced Locations.
You can of course choose a different Geoaccuracy® level:
- select Moderate to bid on devices that the system recognizes as found in the same city as the received GPS coordinates.
- select Low to bid on devices for which we have not received GPS coordinates, but that our system recognizes as found in a specific geolocation leveraging their validated IP address.
- select High to leverage only bid requests conveying accurate and reliable GPS Lat/Long coordinates.
- select None if you do not wish to enable this feature
See Understanding Geofenced Locations: Static, Isochrone and Catchment Areas for more information.
Define Areas One-by-One
STEP 4.1 Click Actions > Add a New Area
- Click + Add Area. The manual area creation form will open.
STEP 4.2 Enter the Area Address
Enter the area address in the relevant field and click on the lens icon to locate it on the map.
STEP 4.3 Select the Type of the Area
You can choose to create different areas depending on how broad your audience should be.
| Area Type | Field | Description |
|---|---|---|
Static | Radius | The Radius around the geopoint you are targeting. |
Radius Measurement Unit | Meters. | |
| Isochrone | Transportation type | Select whether the isochrones will be calculated according to a distance to be run by either car or by foot. |
| Time | The isochrone distance in minutes. | |
| Isochrone limits | Whether your catchment area should be confined within an isochrone. | |
| Affinity | The level of affinity that the catchment areas need to have with respect to the main area (POI) you are targeting.
Selecting Orange, only similar and highly similar areas will be displayed (meaning areas where many device IDs seen in the POI were also seen). Selecting Yellow, all affinity levels will be displayed (meaning also areas where only a few device IDs seen in the POI were also seen) |
Max 100 KMSTEP 4.4 Click Save
Click Save to save the Tactic and create your Geofenced location.
STEP 5.1 Click Actions > Import areas from CSV file
- Click Upload areas to Import areas from a CSV file.
STEP 5.2 Select a CSV file and Upload It
To successfully import a CSV file, your file must contain the required columns listed below.
File columns
| Column Name | Required? | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Name | required | The name of the area |
| Lat | required unless Address is entered | The latitude of the centre of the area |
| Long | required unless Address is entered | The longitude of the centre of the area |
| Address | required unless Lat, Long are entered | The address of the area (street name and number). Example: if your target address is: Victoria Embankment, Westminster, London SW1A 2JH, Great Britain then you should enter in the address field: Victoria Embankment Westminster London SW1A 2JH |
| City | required unless Lat, Long are entered | The city of the area |
| Zipcode | required unless Lat, Long are entered | The zipcode of the area |
| Country | required unless Lat, Long are entered | The country of the area |
| Radius | required | For a static area, enter a value between 0.01 and 100, corresponding to the radius in Kilometres To be left empty for Catchment and Isochrone areas Info To target an area of 100 meters around the centre of the area, you should enter 0.1 To target an area of 10 meters around the centre of the area, you should enter 0.01 and so on... |
| Travel_time | required for isochrone areas | An integer numeric value greater than 0, corresponding to a number of minutes To be left empty for Static areas |
| Transportation_type | required for isochrone areas | "car" or "walk" To be left empty for Static areas |
| Affinity | required for catchment areas | "low" for yellow, orange and red affinities; "medium" for orange and red affinities, "high" for red affinities To be left empty for Static areas |
You can download below a template to test the upload. Any CSV area file you want to upload should respect the same format as the template.
CSV File Templates
You can use the following templates to create your areas.
Tips for Area File Upload
Check for Missing Mandatory Data
- Check for missing mandatory data in the file. As a reminder, the mandatory columns to be filled are
Name
Lat (required unless Address is entered)
Long (required unless Address is entered)
Address (required unless Lat, Long are entered)
City (required unless Lat, Long are entered)
Country (required unless Lat, Long are entered)
Radius (required for static areas)
Transportation_type (required for isochrone areas) → must be empty as of yet
Travel_time (required for isochrone areas) → must be empty as of yet
Affinity (required for catchment areas) → must be empty as of yet
Avoid Special Characters
- Check for the presence of any ‘special characters’ in the values you provide; the system does not recognize files with special characters in label, address etc. Please remove or replace all special characters before saving the file.
Be Careful of Extra Commas in Addresses
- Check for any commas in the cell values, especially in the "address" line! As we use a .csv file, commas in your cell values will distort the file incorrectly while uploading. If your address line is for instance
"1, Piazza del Duomo" we recommend removing the comma so that the system won't be tricked to think that it's two separate fields. Hence, please rather enter "1 Piazza del Duomo"
Address field can take the full address
To avoid mismatching between addresses from different cities, it is encouraged to enter the full address without commas (including zip code and city) in the "address field".
Example:
if your full target address is: Victoria Embankment, Westminster, London SW1A 2JH, Great Britain
then you may enter in the "address" field:
Victoria Embankment Westminster London SW1A 2JH
MS Excel Users: Make Sure Columns are Separated by Commas
- We have also noticed that some MS Excel default saving configurations will have your CSV file use semi-colons ( ; ) as separators instead of commas ( , ), and add quotes (" ") at the beginning and at the end of your csv's lines.
As such, we recommend you open your CSV file in a text editor before uploading it to make sure that values are separated by commas.
You can follow these steps:- On MS Excel, when saving your CSV file, go to File menu, select “Save As…” and then select “UTF-8 CSV” format.
- After saving the file in this format, open the file in a text editor (like Notepad). You will observe all the comma ( , ) separated values are now separated by semi-colon ( ; )
- Verify that Excel has not added quotes (" ") at the beginning and at the end of your csv's lines.
- Opt for a FIND AND REPLACE in the text editor
- Find all semi-colons ( ; ) and Replace them by commas ( , )
- Save the file again
- Upload the file on Fusio
Check for Extra Lines at the Bottom
- We received reports of csv files containing an empty last line looking like: ,,,,,,,,,,,,,
Remove such empty lines before uploading the file.
Check for Duplicate Lines at the Bottom
- Check for the presence of any duplicate lines in your files: submitting the same lat/long in two or more lines may result in the whole upload failing.
STEP 5.3 Save the Tactic
The areas will be created from the file you uploaded once the tactic is saved.
Area IDs
Area IDs are assigned according to the geographical position of their centre. This means that Areas whose centres share the same lat/long coordinates or addresses will have the same Area ID.
As a consequence:
1. If the same Area address is defined in multiple tactics:
We advise applying a breakdown by tactic when creating a Report and selecting Area name as a dimension, in order not to have their data aggregated
2. if the same Area address is defined on multiple Areas on the same tactic:
All events will be attributed to the same Area, as such it will be impossible to sort events generated for each area (irrespective if they are static, isochrone or catchment).