Smart Geo-fencing with Location Sensitive Product Affinity

Abstract

Geo-fencing is a location based service that allows sending of messages to users who enter/exit a specified geographical area, known as a geo-fence. Today, it has become one of the popular location based mobile marketing strategies. However, the process of geofencing is presently manual, i.e. a retailer has to specify the location and the radius of area around it to setup the geo-fences. In addition, this process does not take into account the user’s preference towards the targeted product/service and thus, can compromise his/her experience of the app that sends these communications. We attempt to solve this problem by presenting a novel end-to-end system for automated creation of affnity based smart geo-fences. Affnity towards a product/service refers to the user’s interest in a product/service. Our unique formulation to estimate affnity, using historical app usage data, is sensitive to a user’s location as well and thus, the affnity is termed as location sensitive product affnity (LSPA). The geo-fence logic tries to capture contiguous groups of locations where the affnity high. Experiments on real world ecommerce dataset reveals that geo-fences designed by our approach performs signiffcantly better at accurately targeting the users who are interested in a product. We thus show that, using historical app usage data, geo-fences can be created in an automated manner and help enterprises target interested users with better accuracy as compared to the present industry practices.

Publication
In 25th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems, ACM SIGSPATIAL 2017.
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