Radar location context playbook

by Radar Team on March 7, 2019

Industry-leading apps use Radar to build contextual experiences, delight users, and increase engagement.

In this playbook, we explain how the smartest product and marketing teams are using Radar to:

Build contextual in-app experiences
Send contextual push notifications
Power operations
Build location-based segments
Enrich behavioral analytics
And more

Radar overview

Radar allows you to add location context and tracking to your apps with just three steps and a few lines of code:

Configure context types. Create custom geofences, enable Places (place, chain, and category detection), enable Insights (home, work, and traveling detection), or enable Regions (country, state, DMA, and postal code detection).
Integrate SDK. Integrate the SDK. In the foreground, change the in-app experience based on user context. In the background, listen for events. Or, before integrating, test with our toolkit apps for iOS and Android.
Enable integrations. Create a webhook or enable server-side integrations to send Radar events and user context to other systems.

For shopping & retail use cases, you might enable the following context types:

Create custom geofences with tag store, tied to store ID, to generate user.entered_geofence events
Enable Places to generate user.entered_place events for specific chains, including competitors for geo-conquesting
Enable Insights to generate user.entered_home and user.started_traveling events

For food & dining use cases, you might enable the following context types:

Create custom geofences with tag restaurant, tied to restaurant ID, to generate user.entered_geofence events
Enable Places to generate user.entered_place events for specific chains, including competitors for geo-conquesting
Enable Insights to generate user.entered_home and user.started_traveling events

For travel & transportation use cases, you might enable the following context types:

Create custom geofences with tag hotel or poi to generate user.entered_geofence events
Enable Places to generate user.entered_place events for airports
Enable Insights to generate user.started_traveling events

Or, for entertainment & sports use cases, you might enable the following context types:

Create custom geofences with tag venue, tied to venue ID, to generate user.entered_geofence events
Enable Places to generate user.entered_place events for stadiums or sports bars
Enable Insights to generate user.entered_home and user.started_traveling events

For other use cases, the same concepts apply.

With these tools, let's get started!

Example 1: Build contextual in-app experiences

You can change the in-app experience based on geofence or place.

For a shopping & retail app, you might create geofences tied to store IDs or enable Places for specific chains.

Radar.trackOnce { (status, location, events, user) in
    user?.geofences?.forEach { (geofence) in
        if geofence.tag == "store" {
            // user is at store, change in-app experience
        }
    }
}

Radar.trackOnce { (status, location, events, user) in
    if user?.place?.hasChain("target") {
        // user is at Target, change in-app experience
    }
}

Contextual in-app experiences can improve the user experience, increase conversion, and increase engagement.

Example 2: Send contextual push notifications

You can send push notifications in a marketing automation integration like Braze, Iterable, Urban Airship, or Leanplum, or in a custom webhook.

For a food & dining app, you might trigger a push notification when a user enters a geofence with tag restaurant or enters a place with chain mcdonalds. In Braze:

Contextual push notifications can increase engagement, increase spend, and even attract customers away from competitors when used for geo-conquesting.

Example 3: Power operations

You can power operations based on location tracking, including order-ahead, delivery, or automatic check-in.

For a travel & transportation app, you might listen for events server-side with a webhook, Google or Firebase Cloud Function, or AWS Lambda Function:

app.post('/webhooks/radar', (req, res, next) => {
    const event = req.body.event;
    if (event.type === 'user.entered_geofence' &&
        event.geofence.tag === 'hotel') {
        // user is at hotel, trigger check-in flow
    }
});

Example 4: Build location-based segments

You can build segments in a customer data platform integration like Segment or mParticle, export events from the Radar dashboard, or send events to AWS Redshift, Google BigQuery, or another data warehouse through a custom webhook.

For example, you can build a segment of users who performed the event user.entered_place with category sports-bar more than 3 times in the last 30 days. In mParticle:

Personalization with segments can improve the user experience and increase engagement.

Example 5: Enrich behavioral analytics

Finally, you can enrich behavioral events like app installs, app opens, searches, or purchases with location context using behavioral analytics integrations like Amplitude and Mixpanel.

Enriching behavioral events with location context can help you understand how users engage with your app in the real world.

These are just a few examples of ways that you can use Radar to build contextual experiences, delight users, and increase engagement.

Ready to take your app to the next level? Sign up or contact our sales team. We can't wait to see what you'll build.

See our industry-specific playbooks for more examples and inspiration: