Should an Ad Agency Offer Geoconquesting or Protection from It?

This study examines the interaction between top-of-funnel advertising (e.g., search or display advertising) and bottom-of-funnel advertising (e.g., using a mobile application on a smart phone). We are particularly interested in the phenomenon of geoconquesting: the bottom-of-funnel advertising efforts of a firm to poach (or lure away) customers that have come to a competing firm’s physical store as a result of top-of-funnel advertising efforts by the firm. Geoconquesting efforts by a competing firm should reduce a focal firm’s incentive to invest in top-of-funnel efforts. Thus, a key challenge for an agent like Google that provides both top-of-funnel and bottom-of-funnel advertising services, is to balance the inherent conflict between the two in order to maximize the total revenue collected from the two forms of advertising. We develop a game-theoretic model to study the this phenomenon. A key result is that sometimes the agent benefits from not offering geoconquesting, but instead promises, after collecting a fee, to protect the advertisers from poaching on each other’s search traffic. Interestingly, such a protection service becomes more lucrative for the agent when a cheaper outside option for geoconquesting is available to the advertisers.