Here’s a question about geolocation-based online marketing I received today:

I use google analytics. The service I sell online is location specific. I am getting visits clustered around various locations.

Any creative ideas on how to target visitors from specific locations? Does this make any sense?

Something like: If you are from San Diego, click here for a special offer?

Thoughts? Ideas? Experience to share?

Geotargeting your advertising messages is INCREDIBLY beneficial in a lot of cases.

For example, think about this.  If you are looking for a carpet cleaner and you start searching in Google for carpet cleaners, you will find a bunch.  Now, what if one of the carpet cleaner’s  sites that you visit has an special offer specifically for your city, but the other 5 you visit don’t?

Which business looks like it is in your city?

Which one of the 6 businesses are you more likely to call?

See the benefit of geo-targeted messages, even on your own website?

Now, let’s assume that your carpet cleaning business doesn’t just serve one city.  Let’s say that it is actually a large franchise that serves the entire country.  What then?

You can still geo-target your sales messages on your own site.  Actually, in this case it’s even more important than if you’re a small, local company.

If you geo-target your offers, it makes your business look like it is there to serve the specific location of your visitor.  And that, my friend, is HUGE!

It also keeps confusion down since you’re not showing irrelevant information.  For example, if someone from New York sees an ad for San Diego on your site, they might believe that your business only serves San Diego.  If you serve New York as well, then you probably just lost a customer.  Ouch…

If want to capitalize on geo-targeting and are wondering exactly how you can do it, there are a few options for you, depending on how you are sending traffic to your site.  The trick is to either look up where your visitors are coming from by using their IP address or some other identifying information, or tag your url links with something that will tell your server where they are from.

Here are 2 ways to do this:

The best way to do this works really well, but it is the more complex of the two.  I personally do it this way, using PHP:

1) Have your web developer program your site to look at the visitor’s IP address (With an Apache server running a PHP-based site, your visitor’s IP address is stored in $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']).

2) Set up the Net::Geo PEAR package for PHP, which allows your server to do geolocation lookups on your visitor’s IP address to determine approximately where he/she is located (at least down to the portion of the state).

Here’s a link to the Net::Geo installation instructions

3) If they are within the region of the state you are having the special offer for, then show the ad. Otherwise, don’t show it. (Using this method, you can have a series of ads that are all location-specific).  This will require some more code from your developer.

Here’s the other way to do it, but it is limited to Pay-Per-Click ads only.  It’s easy to do, but much more limited:

1) Geotarget your ads in Google Adense, Yahoo, etc. (make a set of ads that target San Diego only)

2) Change the urls in these ads to include a parameter, like this:

http://www.myurl.com/?loc=SanDiego

3) Now get your web developer to write in a simple test on your site so that if the loc parameter = “SanDiego”, then show the ad.

Using either of these two methods works very well, although I prefer the first method.  It’s more complex, but it covers all cases.

If you don’t do geo-location targeting on your website, you could be missing out on landing new customers.  Targeting your sales messages directly to your customers based on their location makes your business more relevant to what they need and gives it a more local feeling.  Those always increase sales.  Especially if your business provides a service, being in the right location (or at least the appearance of being in the right location) means everything in the mind of your customer.

Stop missing out on sales that are so easy to capitalize on!

If you have any questions or need help, let me know.  My business specializes in doing things just like this, which are child’s play to us.

Web Development, System Integration and Online Marketing by Submerged Solutions LLC

-Kris

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