User Location and Geofencing

Supported Platforms

The following platforms support location tracking and geofencing:

• Android
• iOS

Location Tracking

Location tracking is the ability to identify the geographic location (latitude and longitude) of a user’s device. Permission must be granted to your app to allow for location tracking.

Location updates can be provided continuously, which results in higher accuracy, but requires more battery consumption.

If continuous tracking is disabled or not available, the user’s last known location can be retrieved with an explicit method call. This approach uses less battery and can be used in apps that do not require real-time location monitoring.

The following variables are added to the data layer for each location tracking call:

Geofencing

Geofencing is a location tracking service that combines awareness of the user’s location with the user’s proximity to a geofence. A geofence is a virtual perimeter surrounding an area of interest, specified by latitude, longitude, and a radius.

Geofencing uses three transition states to track a user’s interaction with a geofence. These transition states trigger tracking calls in the Tealium library. The following transition states are monitored:

The specifics of your geofencing is defined in a geofences file and provided to your app during initialization.

The following variables are tracked during geofencing transition states:

Geofence File

Geofencing is enabled when a geofence file is provided during app initialization. A geofence file contains coordinates of points of interest and which transition states to track in JSON format.

There are two options when providing the geofences file: a local file or a hosted URL.

File Format

When creating your geofence file, name the file geofences.json. Geofences are written as key-value pairs with the variables listed in the table below.

[{
  "name": "Geofence_Name",
  "latitude": 0.000,
  "longitude": 0.000,
  "radius": 100,
  "expire_after": -1,
  "trigger_on_enter": true,
  "trigger_on_exit": false,
  "minimum_dwell_time": 0 },
 {
    ...
 }]

The following properties define each geofence: