Geofencing vs Geolocation: What’s the Difference?

Geolocation and geofencing are two technologies with a wide range of applications in many location-based industries.

What is Geolocation?

The ultimate goal of gelocation is to determine the position of a device as accurately as possible.

The early technology was GPS (a US project), but this issue is so pertinent many other nations launched their own satellite system, including GLONASS (a Russian project) and Galileo (a European project). Satellite positioning technologies are called GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite System). Ever since the early 1980s when GPS was first made available for civilian use, many different devices have supported GPS - the most common applications were in marine settings.

However, more recently with the rise of smartphones geolocation technology has advanced significantly. No longer is GNSS the only means of locating a device, but WiFi and cellular can be used too. Sometimes all three are used to get very accurate locations. Most of the time though, they are used in combination to always get an approximate location - some buildings block GNSS signals but approximate location through WiFi and cellular is still possible.

Desktop computers also have a low accuracy form of geolocation - the location of the IP address. This is usually very low accuracy compared to other methods though, usually only giving the country or at best the city of the device.

Let’s look at some usage examples of geolocation

1. Locating users: loads of applications, especially maps, automatically place a pin at the user’s current location
2. Search results: many apps have features like “restaurants near me”, which can show the closest restaurants to your current location
3. Navigation: navigation systems now come with a feature which uses the user’s current location to display on the map while providing directions to the destination
4. Games: with smartphones becoming common, lots of games were developed around geolocation. PokémonGo is the most popular of these
5. Asset tracking: lots of business now display all of their assets on a map to check on the whole fleet - Uber does this with the driver map, for example
6. Safety: Many emergency services are now integrating geolocation technology to find people in need faster, without them having to explain their location in words

What is Geofencing?

The goal of geofencing is to trigger certain events depending on the location of a device. It involves defining “fences” which trigger these events - which can be as small as a single room all the way to continent size. For example, imagine a customer waiting on a parcel who can get a push notification on their phone when the parcel comes within 1 mile of their delivery address.

Geofencing operates by defining some area in which an event can take place. The events can really be of two types - boundary crossing or region locked. Boundary crossing events take place when a device enters or leaves an area. The parcel notification example would fall into this category. The area can also be defined in many ways - most common is either a radius (with X miles of Y location) or through some custom shape.

For a fun example of region locking, we can look at Pokemon Go:

Here’s the coverage map for Solrock and Lunatone spawning in PokémonGo. Users in the orange area can only get Solrock - inside that geofence, they are locked to that particular Pokémon. This also shows off what a custom area looks like.

Here’s some more uses of geofencing. We’ll also state the type of geofencing (boundary trigger vs region locking & radius vs custom shape)

1. Specialise marketing campaigns: it makes sense to target ads based on location. For example, a store that only has locations in the UK doesn’t need to spend ad budget on ads in South Africa (region locking, custom shape). Some retailers do even more local advertising and push discount offers when a user is close to a store (boundary trigger, radius).
2. Events: Lots of events have experimented with geofenced experiences, for example, push notifications about schedules at music festivals based on the viewing areas of different stages (region locking, custom shape)
3. Security: Banks and other financial institutions use geofencing to help prevent fraud by blocking transactions which occur outside of your normal spending areas (region locking, custom shape)
4. Games: Many of the same games which use geolocation also use geofencing - we’ve already seen how PokémonGo does this (region locking, custom shape)
5. Safety: Some worksites have started implementing geofencing rules. For example, alerts when workers enter dangerous areas or when sensitive equipment leaves some areas (boundary trigger, custom shape)
6. Notifications: there’s many different kinds of notifications that can be sent, we already looked at notifications in delivery systems. Telegram, a popular messaging app, has a feature where two friends can get a notification when they are within some distance of each other (boundary trigger, radius)
7. Website personalisation: many websites redirect users to a country specific version of their website depending on the country of the user’s IP address. This could be to customise the language or currency (region locking, custom shape)
8. Filters: A lot of filters can use a radius, for example, filtering by results within 5 miles of a location (region locking, radius). This also represents one application of geofencing which doesn’t depend upon geolocation - in this example, you might be filtering for a location you aren’t at. That could help a user find hotels in a different city, for example.

Why the Confusion?

Geolocation and geofencing are easily confused, and I think the reason for this is because geolocation is often the first step in geofencing, and they’re closely linked. If you don’t know the location of the user, you can’t change the behaviour of your application based on their location. However, as we’ve seen, there are at least some examples of geofencing which don’t depend upon geolocation, so they aren’t the same thing.

In fact, this confusion is so common that some articles which try and explain the difference get it wrong! Advertising is often counted as an application of geolocation but this is really specifically a geofencing application. Even if you base ads on the country of the user - that’s still changing the behaviour of the application based on a boundary (in this instance, the boundary is the whole country). It’s effectively saying “If you’re inside the UK you get ad A, if you’re outside, you get ad B”. If there’s any kind of boundary involved in changing the application behaviour, it’s geofencing.

Hopefully now you have a good understanding of what geolocation and geofencing is, their applications, and the differences between them!