Nextdoor Wants Advertisers to Trade ZIP Codes for Neighborhoods
Could the ZIP code, long the default unit of local advertising, be hiding a dozen distinct neighborhoods with different worries, budgets, and buying habits?
Nextdoor is betting that it does. The company asks members for a home address when they join, has spent years mapping where they live, and now wants brands to target against that map in a U.S. local ad market that BIA Advisory Services projects will reach $186.1 billion in 2026.
“Community, we think, is a very important yet almost entirely absent signal in online advertising,” said Andrew Super, head of client solutions, Nextdoor, in this video interview with Beet.TV at Advertising Week New York. “We talk a lot about digital communities, but very little about actual neighborhoods.”
Drawing the lines
Super said the difference from geofencing and ZIP-code targeting is that Nextdoor is “able to target down to the neighborhood level, the actual physical neighborhoods that people live in.” By his count, Nextdoor has 12 distinct neighborhoods per U.S. ZIP code on average.
“We’ve spent the better part of 15 years working with communities directly to actually draw polygons around their real communities,” he told Lisa Granatstein, editorial director, Beet.TV. “It’s been a very painstaking process, but what it’s given us is the canvas to actually target genuine communities on the platform.”
Nextdoor packaged the approach in October as Neighborhood Intelligence, which the company said draws on 350,000 neighborhood boundaries. It reported that pilot campaigns delivered a 1.28x brand awareness lift and a 1.16x ad recall lift compared with prior ZIP-code strategies.
Speaking to sentiment
Super’s core hypothesis is that where a person lives “has a lot of importance for purchase decisions,” from where they shop and who they work with to the services they need. He said everything from local housing stock to the weather can shape those choices.
To test it, Nextdoor split a large internet service provider’s DMA-level campaigns into neighborhoods grouped by negative, neutral, and positive sentiment. “The community that was talking about outages got ads related to reliability. The one talking about pricing got ads related to discounts,” Super said.
He said a brand lift study showed the approach outperformed Nextdoor’s earlier ZIP-code targeting, though more testing is needed to isolate what is “actually moving the needle.” The question is whether the gain comes from the finer map, the tailored message, or both.
Built before it’s baked
Super’s working view is that “addressing communities as communities, speaking to their lived experience, is a really important and underutilized tactic for advertisers.” For now, Nextdoor is selling the capability as a managed offering rather than self-serve, working in close consultation with advertisers.
“This is a very emergent piece of tech for us. It’s based on really foundational data that we sit on,” he said. Behind the scenes, he said, Nextdoor is folding the data into neighborhood-based media planning and optimization engines that combine user, household, and neighborhood signals.
Meanwhile, it is running ad hoc tests with advertisers “because we have the capability to do it and we don’t want to wait to start using it until it’s completely baked.” The pitch rests on differences people notice locally but rarely see reflected in media plans.
“Two adjacent neighborhoods might be quite different in terms of housing stock, the types of people that gravitate towards there, where they shop, the professionals that they work with,” Super said. “That reality is what we are trying to bring to advertisers and embed into our tech stack.”
Could the ZIP code, long the default unit of local advertising, be hiding a dozen distinct neighborhoods with different worries, budgets, and buying habits?
Nextdoor is betting that it does. The company asks members for a home address when they join, has spent years mapping where they live, and now wants brands to target against that map in a U.S. local ad market that BIA Advisory Services projects will reach $186.1 billion in 2026.
“Community, we think, is a very important yet almost entirely absent signal in online advertising,” said Andrew Super, head of client solutions, Nextdoor, in this video interview with Beet.TV at Advertising Week New York. “We talk a lot about digital communities, but very little about actual neighborhoods.”
Drawing the lines
Super said the difference from geofencing and ZIP-code targeting is that Nextdoor is “able to target down to the neighborhood level, the actual physical neighborhoods that people live in.” By his count, Nextdoor has 12 distinct neighborhoods per U.S. ZIP code on average.
“We’ve spent the better part of 15 years working with communities directly to actually draw polygons around their real communities,” he told Lisa Granatstein, editorial director, Beet.TV. “It’s been a very painstaking process, but what it’s given us is the canvas to actually target genuine communities on the platform.”
Nextdoor packaged the approach in October as Neighborhood Intelligence, which the company said draws on 350,000 neighborhood boundaries. It reported that pilot campaigns delivered a 1.28x brand awareness lift and a 1.16x ad recall lift compared with prior ZIP-code strategies.
Speaking to sentiment
Super’s core hypothesis is that where a person lives “has a lot of importance for purchase decisions,” from where they shop and who they work with to the services they need. He said everything from local housing stock to the weather can shape those choices.
To test it, Nextdoor split a large internet service provider’s DMA-level campaigns into neighborhoods grouped by negative, neutral, and positive sentiment. “The community that was talking about outages got ads related to reliability. The one talking about pricing got ads related to discounts,” Super said.
He said a brand lift study showed the approach outperformed Nextdoor’s earlier ZIP-code targeting, though more testing is needed to isolate what is “actually moving the needle.” The question is whether the gain comes from the finer map, the tailored message, or both.
Built before it’s baked
Super’s working view is that “addressing communities as communities, speaking to their lived experience, is a really important and underutilized tactic for advertisers.” For now, Nextdoor is selling the capability as a managed offering rather than self-serve, working in close consultation with advertisers.
“This is a very emergent piece of tech for us. It’s based on really foundational data that we sit on,” he said. Behind the scenes, he said, Nextdoor is folding the data into neighborhood-based media planning and optimization engines that combine user, household, and neighborhood signals.
Meanwhile, it is running ad hoc tests with advertisers “because we have the capability to do it and we don’t want to wait to start using it until it’s completely baked.” The pitch rests on differences people notice locally but rarely see reflected in media plans.
“Two adjacent neighborhoods might be quite different in terms of housing stock, the types of people that gravitate towards there, where they shop, the professionals that they work with,” Super said. “That reality is what we are trying to bring to advertisers and embed into our tech stack.”
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