Start using the popular Waze app for your advertising

You have certainly heard of the Waze app. It has been on the market since 2006 and aims to give drivers the best possible driving experience. It is a navigation app that uses live traffic data shared by Waze users themselves — accidents, jams, police patrols, everything happening on the road. I do not know whether you knew that Google bought the app 7 years ago.

It may have happened to you that you were sitting at a traffic light and suddenly a pop-up appeared advertising a petrol station, a restaurant or a shop nearby. Even though it belongs to Google, Waze advertising is still in its infancy next to the Google Ads platform. The user environment feels a little clumsy and disorganised. It takes longer to settle into. Despite this slight early shortcoming, it is certainly not negligible that more than 100 million active users worldwide use the app daily. In Slovakia the number of active users is estimated at more than 75,000.

So, are you in? In the next few paragraphs we will go through everything you need to know before advertising through Waze — real figures included.

Signing in

First you have to create an account, by signing in either with your existing Waze account (if you are already a user) or with a Gmail account.

Signing into Waze Ads

Once signed in you are prompted to set up a payment method (add a card) and to fill in basic advertiser details (name, business category). The billing details also have to be filled in correctly.

Basic account setup

4 ad types

• Pin – your logo shown on the map at the branch's real address. Clicking the logo shows further information.
• Zero Speed Takeover – when the vehicle stops, an information banner appears at the top of the display.
• Arrow – once the app is opened it points the way to the promoted location. Activating it takes you straight to that location and shows further information. The location can be saved or headed to directly.
• Search – the branch's location is highlighted when searching in the app.

The basic ad types (Premium aside)

Minimum budget + bidding

The minimum monthly budget depends directly on the formats used. The minimum budget is $60 a month. At that budget, though, only two of the formats above can be used — Pin and Search. To use every format you have to spend more. The picture below shows the minimum spends and the formats they support. At a spend of $3,000 a month you have the Zero Speed format available alongside Pin and Search. Large brands wanting every ad type and full support have to spend at least $25,000 a month, which gains them so-called Premium membership.

Without a Premium partnership the ads always have a strictly fixed format; in practice only the logo's dimensions can change. You pay per impression, so the familiar CPM model applies. The minimum bid is $1. At the minimum monthly budget of $60 that means 60,000 impressions a month, which a specialist can guarantee their client. Note also that the Search format is counted within the price of the Pin format.

The formats offered vs. the corresponding monthly budget

Add your branches to the map

After all the initial setup it is time to start your first campaign. First you have to set up the locations — your bricks-and-mortar branches, which will appear on the map or be highlighted in search. Besides the name, you can add exact addresses, a short description, a URL (pointing straight at the e-shop), a phone number and opening hours to a location. You can add a maximum of 10 branches. Each location can have its own bid, you need not advertise every branch, and the ad's display can be tied to opening hours.

Setting up the first ad

We have already tested Waze advertising with some of our clients, though only the basic version, so we had only the basic ad formats available. Creating an ad is nothing complicated: you need one square logo of good quality, which will appear scaled down on the map itself and, once clicked, in the ad. You also need a square banner and a general banner, likewise square, at at least 200x200px. Users are navigated straight to the branch after clicking Drive There.

As for the Search ad, it is counted within the Pin format and does not have to be set up separately. Once the Pin ad is created, the ad will automatically appear highlighted in search too.

Off at full throttle

After a month of testing we can also give you a real view of advertising on Waze. The campaign ran with ten selected locations and branches, all with the same starting bid — one dollar per thousand impressions. We spent slightly more than the minimum budget, something over $66 to be precise.

Headline results of the month-long test campaign

The attached screenshot shows the real results, from which you can read that Waze delivers what it promises. The budget spent relates directly to the number of impressions achieved. Besides the impressions from the Pin format we also won almost 2,300 further impressions from search. We can see the Search campaign recorded more navigations straight to a branch, which is understandable. In most cases the Search campaign shadows the Pins campaign: people see the logo, it catches their interest, they do not manage to tap it at that moment, but then look the brand up through search. In the statistics you can see exactly which branch was shown most, searched for most and where the most navigations took place. We noticed too, of course, that it correlated with traffic density — Bratislava had the most impressions, since traffic density is highest there.

As I mentioned above, the Waze interface is still in its infancy, as the section that ought to help us report results also suggests. There are basic metrics (impressions, clicks, navigations…) and some charts that should help with reporting, but it is rather clumsy: you cannot choose a monthly view, only daily, and even then the data is hard to read.

Pins results:

Search results:

So if we wanted to compare these two ad formats, we would certainly pick click-through rate as the metric. From the figures given above we can already see that the Search ad format had the higher CTR, which stands to reason, since it is a relevant query.

To round things off, Waze naturally ranks among the further ways we can reach another group of people in specific locations relatively simply and cheaply.