The little pink dots on the Waze map are your potential market through Waze Ads. They are people who are travelling right now using the Waze App for navigation. So the audience for Waze Ads is not ALL of the people who are passing by your town on the interstate, only those who are using the Waze App which, as you can see if you go look at the map, is often quite a few people.

Last year Google bought Waze for nearly a billion dollars so they must think all of those Wazers are worth quite a bit. That makes sense though because Google has been putting a lot of emphasis on developing the local market for business ads and Waze is a great addition to those efforts. I opened the Waze app on my iPhone and noticed that early adopters of Waze Ads are already there. In my own neighborhood Dunkin Doughnuts, Applebee's and KFC had little branded pins in the map.

You get a little branded pin on the map which shows to everyone and also a billboard that goes across the top of the screen. This is pretty awesome for the right business in the right place at the right time. A coffee shop is a good example as is a night spot, a truck stop, a hotel and any number of businesses who depend on travelers and commuters to make a living.

Signing up for Waze Ads

Just for fun I went through the process of signing up for Waze Ads. I wanted to see how difficult it would be. I found it to be pretty straightforward with very few settings. This is great from the point of ease of use but not so great for those of us used to running finely tuned Adwords campaigns. However the platform seems to be adequate for its intended purpose which is to be an online billboard along the Google/Waze highway.

While signing up you can upload your logo for the pin and create or upload a graphic for the billboard ad. You can also set a daily schedule for the ad to run and select which days of the week (at least I am assuming you can do this with the business hours tool). Then you just bid how much you are willing to pay per thousand impressions, set a monthly budget and you are off.

From what I see many major brands have jumped aboard the Waze bandwagon already. Because of this, if for no other reason, I think that small businesses who depend on the traffic passing by should seriously consider Waze ads as a part of their overall marketing strategy.