If your geofence audience is collecting fewer devices than expected, it is usually due to one of the reasons below. Most are easy to adjust. A few are tied to privacy and compliance rules and cannot be changed.
1. Your geofence is too small or the location has low foot traffic
Device counts depend on how many unique devices physically visit the area you fenced. A very small boundary, or a location that simply does not get much traffic, will collect fewer devices.
What to do: Expand the boundary to cover the full property (parking lots, entrances), or add more locations of the same type to the audience. Target zones can be up to one square mile each.
2. Your collection timeframe is too short
A narrow lookback window or date range limits how far back we look for visiting devices, which reduces the count.
What to do: Widen the timeframe. A rolling lookback can extend up to 12 months and updates automatically. A date range stays fixed to the dates you set.
3. Recent visits are not available yet (48-hour scrubbing)
We run a 48-hour data scrubbing process and cannot collect or serve in real time. Devices that visited in the last couple of days will not appear yet, and you cannot select future dates in a date range.
What to do: Allow at least 48 hours, then check the count again.
4. The audience was just created and is still populating
A newly built or newly activated audience needs time to gather devices before counts stabilize.
What to do: Make sure you clicked Activate Audience, then give it time to populate.
5. Devices are collected in the United States only
Target zones only collect devices located in the United States. Fencing a location outside the U.S. will return little or no data.
6. Privacy laws and restricted locations
To protect user privacy and comply with advertising regulations, geofences placed on or near certain sensitive locations collect little to no device data, and audiences built from them may be rejected or disabled. This is a key reason a geofence can come back with very few or zero devices.
Restricted location types include, but are not limited to:
Hospitals and medical facilities
Cancer treatment centers
Addiction recovery centers
HIV/AIDS clinics
Religious institutions (when used to imply belief or affiliation)
Government buildings and facilities (for example, courthouses, city halls, federal or state offices)
States with stricter privacy laws
Several U.S. states have passed consumer-privacy and data-protection laws that limit how device and location data can be collected. Geofence audiences in these states often return lower device counts. You can still run geofencing campaigns there; the available pool of devices is simply smaller.
States where we currently see reduced device collection include:
California
Maryland
Oregon
Minnesota
Delaware
New Jersey
Rhode Island
Kentucky
Note: Coverage in these states continues to improve over time as our data partners refine their collection. If you ran a campaign or pulled a report in one of these states several months ago, it is worth re-checking, as counts may have recovered. Sensitive-location restrictions above cannot be overridden. If you believe a location was restricted in error, reach out to our team.
Still seeing low counts?
If you have widened your boundary and timeframe, waited past the 48-hour window, and confirmed your location is not restricted, click the chat icon at the bottom of the screen and our team will take a look.