August 26, 2025 at 5:50 a.m.
Geo-fenced and targeted: Rhinelander maps its marketing
Most cell phone users know their location is no secret — but in Rhinelander, that digital breadcrumb trail is turning into a roadmap for smarter marketing.
At this month’s Rhinelander tourism and marketing committee meeting, chamber director Lauren Sackett spoke to the committee about how she uses a platform called Placer. AI to help target the city’s marketing efforts.
Placer.ai is a location intelligence software analytics platform aimed at helping businesses, municipalities and economic development entities by providing insights into movements of people and attendance at various locations using geofenced, demographic data. Sackett brought the matter to the committee to explain how she drilled down into the wealth of information offered by the platform.
All of the geofenced data, she said, comes from people who use cell phones. She showed the committee a map she had geofenced, which included the City of Rhinelander proper, including to golf course. The platform highlighted resident population, employee population and out of market visitors.
“A lot of times when I’m pulling data, I’m seeing visitor data,” she said. “Those are people who do not live or work within whatever outlined area I’m using for a report.” Over the last 12 months, she said, the platform showed approximately 844,000 out of market visitors. This is down three percent year-over-year, compared to the previous 12-month period. She said she could drill down into monthly information and even information by the day, if there was enough data collected on a specific day. She said this data would include people who live outside of the city of Rhinelander in surrounding townships but came into the city to work or shop. She said she could also apply a filter that would not include people from a 50-mile area. With that filter applied, there were approximately 670,000 people who came into Rhinelander over the that 12-month period.
“Just out of curiosity, if you bring that down to March and April of this year, will it show you March and April of the year before?” asked mayor Kris Hanus. “Because that would show you the impact of the dome.” Sackett said that was possible, and she had the dome geofenced as well, which likely accounted for a good portion of the decrease in people coming into Rhinelander. Geofencing the dome required special permission from the school system, she said.
She also showed the top visited businesses in the city, which included Walmart and Trig’s. She said the main shopping centers were consistently placing high.
“This platform, when it was created, shopping is the main thing it was created for, so that’s why you tend to see those things always placing very high, because that’s how they started all of this data collection,” Sackett said.
Sackett said she also created custom points of interest, such as a couple blocks of downtown around Brown and Stevens Streets, including the back parking lots on Courtney Street, from Fredrick Street and down to King Street. Over the last 12 months, she said, people had visited over 740,000 times. She did caution however, that it would include anyone who did not live or work within the geofenced region.
“I don’t live or work within that region — I am counted as a visitor,” she said. “So, when I’m deep-diving data, I do set those boundaries of, they have to be 30 or 50 miles away or whatever it might be. They have to spend more than — I don’t want them where they spent less than 10 minutes in that section.” With that filter in place, she said, she could eliminate people who were just driving through, and look at numbers only of people who likely stopped at a business downtown. The average dwell time, she said, or the average amount of time people spend in downtown Rhinelander when they visit, was 66 minutes. She could also see the times of day with the most visitors into the city.
“We can see that these visits, 747, 000 times was done by 131,000 visitors, so people go there an average of 5.66 times, so they are going into that region more than once,” Sackett said.
She also showed the peaks in visitors, which included the Fourth of July parade, where there were 608,000 in the region during that time. The platform has a proprietary model that allows them to extrapolate data from the number of cell phones to reach a more accurate number. For instance, there may be one cell phone, but there is a certain probability that it belongs to a family of four. The All Class Reunion of 2024, downtown trick-or-treat and the St. Patrick’s Day parade also showed spikes in visitors.
There were also some days with extremely low visits. On Christmas Day, the platform showed only 150 people downtown. Thanksgiving and a random Wednesday in March were also very slow downtown. With the volume of people in the downtown, Sacket said, she could see daily data, where that was not necessarily possible in other areas.
Hanus asked whether she could overlay the data with weather. Sackett said she would ask the Placer.ai training staff if that was a possibility.
Sackett has also been using the Placer.ai platform when looking at wayfinding. Understanding how people were coming into the community, she said, would be important in finding the best placement for wayfinding signage. That piece can also help her better understand the number of impressions for digital billboards on certain routes.
She said it was also possible to get an idea regarding where people came from and where they went next. She could also see where visitors came from when they visited the city. This information is very helpful, she said, when looking at marketing to different areas in the state with both digital ads and social media.
A current project involving the Rhinelander Area Silent Trails Association (RASTA) was looking at the economic impact of the Washburn Trail system. Sackett was able to geofence that trailhead using Placer.ai to learn more data to use in conjunction with the survey that was being used as part of the project. At any data point or geofenced area, she said, she could look back three to four years at the data for that area.
Sackett also showed an example of the county fair. By geofencing Pioneer Park, she said, during the fair, she could see the data for those four days. There were 13,000 visits by 10,000 people, which was up by 1.4 percent from the previous year. It could also show the busiest days, as well as the top places people went to and came from to go to the fair.
The platform, she said, had been a great resource for her. The data has been helpful in a number of ways. The platform will also deep dive information into specific population subsets, allowing her to better target her marketing efforts and the preferences of those groups as to how they prefer to receive their information and advertising.
Beckie Gaskill may be reached via email at [email protected].
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