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Like many small business marketers, you are constantly looking for ways to expand on your digital footprint and drive traffic to your storefront. It can be a tough task to not only weed through all the marketing options and platforms out there, but also show an ROI or trend line on tactics and campaign efforts. With that in mind, this post speaks specifically to vetting advertising on Waze. Let's take a look at the options, the app's competition, and how to do tracking so you can decide if this is a good channel in which to invest.

What is Waze?

If you are unfamiliar with Waze, this maps and directions app is owned by Google and is home to more than 100 million monthly active users. Waze defines itself as “the world's largest community-based traffic and navigation app. Joining drivers in your area who share real-time traffic and road info, saving everyone time and gas money on their daily commute.” This great concept has bolstered user numbers, and like any useful app, it introduced a brand and small business advertising beta in 2015. Three years later, in March of 2018, the company felt confident that its advertising goal of being useful and not abrasive had been reached for full-time usage.

What Waze Advertising Features Are Available?

Waze has advertising options available for businesses of all shapes and sizes, from single storefronts to franchise corporations with hundreds and thousands of locations. But, before we break each of these options down, the preface is that these tactics are tailored to storefront shops. Using Waze, you can target drivers who are on the go near your business location with a meaningful local ad experience. Those efforts are supported by the following advertising placements. (Details provided by Waze.)

• Branded pins - Like a store sign, pins inform and remind drivers that your business is on or near their route.
• Promoted search - Your locations are promoted to the top of the Waze search results and your listings include your brand logo.
• Zero-speed takeovers - These are like digital billboards. They are shown in the app when drivers are at a complete stop.
• Nearby arrow - This arrow appears immediately when someone opens the app. It shows that your business is near where the user is currently located.

Waze Advertising Packages

Waze advertising options come in two packages: starter and plus. Each package is based on a per-day pricing structure. The biggest differences between the two packages are pricing, number of locations, the use of pins and search vs. zero-speed takeover, time scheduling, level of account support, and billing.

(For more information, visit Waze Advertising.)

Case Studies and Analytics

Although Waze advertising is available to a plethora of industries, some common businesses that thrive using its advertising features are: gas stations, restaurants, retail stores, and entertainment venues. A great case study of a retail store is Men’s Warehouse, who used Waze to drive awareness about a charity event and received more than five million impressions and saved three and a half thousand offers. More Waze case studies can be found here.

But, once again, the tracking is what is important. When advertising with Waze, the analytics primarily used are a trend line of foot traffic to your location before and after a paid option is activated, and the amount of users searching for your business or service.

Waze Competitors

Since Waze is used for navigation and direction purposes, its main competitors with larger groups of active users are: Apple, Google, and Bing Maps. But, only two of these options have similar advertising to Waze, and those options are the Google Maps promoted pins and Bing promoted pins. The Google Maps pins are set up through AdWords, and the Bing pins through ad location extensions. However, Google and Bing pins do not appear within Waze, so they could be part of a good collaborative effort to drive more traffic to your local stores. Additionally, these maps do not have community updates for optimal traffic information or car pooling options, which makes Waze the preferred choice and fastest growing option.

In Conclusion

The suggestion from the team at THAT Agency is to start small and test advertising on Waze. Begin with the starter package on some of your locations in larger populated areas and create a special, giveaway, or sale that potential customers might find worthwhile enough to stop by to claim. See if the difference in in-store traffic is substantial and move into more locations.

Looking for other small business advertising ideas? Call 561.832.6262 or contact THAT Agency online. From social media to Amazon and paid search, put our digital advertising services to work for you today. For more on digital marketing trends, download our free guide:

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Editor's Note: This post was originally published in April 2018 and has been updated for freshness, accuracy, and comprehensiveness.