Website Geotargeting Basics
May 3, 2008 | General Affiliating
As a quick note before I countiue, I would like to mention that geo-targeting is by far one of the most overlooked and underused marketing techniques available to webmasters.
I am confident that at least 90% of webmasters are neglecting to utilize geo-targeting, and by doing so they are missing out on prime opportunities to make money from their sites. So take on board what you are about to read, and seriously think about implementing geo-targeting on your own site.
What Is Geo-targeting?
Geo-targeting is where you tailor your ads or content to different people depending on which country they are visiting your site from. For example, you could geo-target a certain banner space so that visitors from the US see one banner, whilst visitors from any other country than the US will see a different banner.
Similarly, you can take this one step further and geo-target the ad so that visitors from each major country like US, UK, Germany, France, Sweden, Australia, Canada and so on will see their own unique banner. Essentially, you can use geo-targeting to show certain content or images based on which country your visitor is coming from.
Why Geo-target?
Geo-targeting is incredibly useful, especially so if you own a poker website. For example, lets say that you have a nice banner ad on your homepage that does moderately well for click throughs and conversions, but the banner is for a poker room that does not accept US players. The site itself receives around 200 visitors a day, with around 50% of those coming from the US. Can you see the problem here?
Showing a banner ad to US visitors for a room that does not accept US players is beyond pointless. That banner is being wasted on 100 or so visitors that will be unable to play at the poker room you are advertising to them. By geotargeting that banner spot instead, you could show US room banners to visitors from the US, whilst showing your non-US room to visitors outside of the US. It really is such a simple idea, yet so many people neglect to geo-target their ads, and by doing so they are missing out on prime opportunities to increase their earnings from their site.
Another reason to geo-target is that you can show more appealing banners to visitors from different countries. As you may already know, banner ad click throughs can be pretty low, as the majority of visitors to your site will have banner blindness, and so will completely ignore any flashy banners that you throw out in front of them.This is normally because most of the time these banners are offering something generic that visitors will not be particularly interested in.
However, if there is a promotion taking place specifically for UK players, you can throw in a specific UK targeted banner and show it to visitors to the UK only. By doing this you can catch their attention with a targeted banner, whilst having the standard banner running for non-UK visitors to help with normal conversions.
In addition to this, you can also catch visitors’ attention by displaying banners in their own language. If you can throw up a banner in a certain country’s own language, or have that country’s flag displayed somewhere in a banner, it is a hell of a lot more likely that it will catch their attention. Consequently, whereas your 200 German visitors a month may have been overlooking your standard sidebar banner, you will be able to catch their attention with an attractive targeted banner in German and squeeze out an extra 5 or so sign-ups that you would have originally missed out on.
How To Geo-target
Geo-targeting isn’t nearly as hard as you might think, as the hard work of figuring out where each visitor is coming from is done for you. The way to geo-target is to upload a simple yet powerful script to your site that allows you to configure banners in an easy to use interface, and then implement those banner configurations in the desired areas on your site. It may sound a little confusing at first, but for those that have used wordpress before, it’s a little like that in a way (but easier).
The best geotargeting script that I have found is MySimpleAds, which is both easy to install and use. The script comes with a $32 price tag, which is incredibly cheap in my opinion seeing as the script may well pay for itself a few times over in the first day through the extra conversions you will receive. So there’s no need to fear that you will be throwing your money down the drain with this script.
I’m not going to go into much detail about how it all works, but as I’ve already said, it provides you with a simple interface to create geo-targeted banners to implement on your site. In addition, you can track the clicks on your banners to analyse which promotions are working the best, so that you can optimize your ads and get as many conversions as possible.
Another highly recommended script you can use for geotargeting is OpenX. This script is free and favoured by many webmasters, so is well worth checking out. In fact, I would say that more people use OpenX that MySimpleAds, but I really enjoy using MySimpleAds for its simplicity. Both of these are quality scripts, but if you’re looking for ease of use, then it’s not a bad idea to shell out $32 for MySimpleAds. Either way, you can’t go wrong with any of these scripts.
No comments yet.