What is geotargeting?
Definition: Geographical targeting is a method to display content on a website based on a visitor's geographic location. The targeted content can be specific regional information, advertising for a local store, or news.Before the page is sent to the browser, the server determines where the request is coming from using a IP / geographic database. The database identifies the country, region and sometimes the city of the user's IP address on the visitor's computer, and then the server decides what to do.
Why is geotargeting important?
The importance of geotargeting can be illustrated by these three simple examples.
If you are a pet shop chain and want to target cold weather pet attire, it makes sense to target only snow bound customers. Floridians would not be interested. Advertising reaches everyone in the world via the web. So if you need to run an advertising campaign but you do not want the world to see it, or you want to change the information for certain parts of the country, you need to geotarget your website.
Consider announcements: Suppose you are the author of a book and you're having a book signing event in a city. Your website could display extra content to visitors that are in that city announcing the visit with location and time information.You can include demographic information from the geoip database that enhances its value to the ecommerce site.
Another use is Credit Card Faud on your eCommerce site. Here is a simple example - suppose your buyer enters a card registered in the U.S. but their IP address shows that their traffic is originating from Myanmar - you have a potential problem.Do you want your Website or App to Geotarget a market?
Requirements
- Subscribe to a IP address database
- Procure the worldwide IP addresses matched to zip codes or longs/lats.
- A database, like MySQL, SQL, Postgress, or Oracle
- a server-side programming language, like PHP, C, Java, perl or VB.Net.
- Optionally, a set of country flags.
