• Geo Targeting – What Exactly Is It?

    Date: 2011.02.22 | Category: General, Promotion | Tags:

    As the adult industry reaches further and further across the online global community we are beginning to realize the importance of our foreign surfers, gone are the days of shifting them off to a dialer site instead, we find more and more companies actually using geo-targeting techniques to filter and monetize this profitable traffic more but, how does geotargeting work and, more importantly, is it any good? They are the questions we will look at in this article.

    GEO::IP – The Basics.

    The Geo::ip module is a relatively simplistic database of IP addresses and, the matching country to which the IP address belongs. This means that the GEO::IP module can be used for a variety of purposes including automatically selecting the language and countries of your visitors, for credit card fraud detection, and for software export controls.

    Geo Targeting – The Basics.

    As described above, the GEO::IP module is what drives any and all forms of geographical location targeting system (geo targeting). Geo targeting is the method most commonly used in the adult industry to either send a surfer to a localized version of a paysite or, send them off to a dialer in an attempt to monetize them it works by checking either the surfers browser language, country ip address or, both of these.

    Putting Geo Targeting To Work.

    Despite what most webmasters may think about the complexities of geo targeting and the GEO::IP Module for Perl they are easy to use and implement and, furthermore, there are cost free and highly effective ways of using geo targeting on your sites to monetize your international traffic. Lets look at two easy free solutions for webmasters to geo target their traffic.

    JavaScript.

    Using JavaScript you could add the following code between your HTML <head> and </head> tags to redirect international traffic to a specific url on your server:

    <SCRIPT LANGUAGE=”JavaScript1.2″>
    <!– Begin
    if (navigator.appName == ‘Netscape’)
    var language = navigator.language;
    else
    var language = navigator.browserLanguage;

    if (language.indexOf(‘en’) > -1) document.location.href = ‘english.shtml';
    else if (language.indexOf(‘nl’) > -1) document.location.href = ‘dutch.shtml';
    else if (language.indexOf(‘fr’) > -1) document.location.href = ‘french.shtml';
    else if (language.indexOf(‘de’) > -1) document.location.href = ‘german.shtml';
    else if (language.indexOf(‘ja’) > -1) document.location.href = ‘japanese.shtml';
    else if (language.indexOf(‘it’) > -1) document.location.href = ‘italian.shtml';
    else if (language.indexOf(‘pt’) > -1) document.location.href = ‘portuguese.shtml';
    else if (language.indexOf(‘es’) > -1) document.location.href = ‘Spanish.shtml';
    else if (language.indexOf(‘sv’) > -1) document.location.href = ‘swedish.shtml';
    else if (language.indexOf(‘zh’) > -1) document.location.href = ‘chinese.shtml';
    else
    document.location.href = ‘english.shtml';
    // End –>
    </script>

    Php.

    Using .php you can add the following to your sites pages to redirect traffic based on their browser language.

    <?
    $user_lan = $HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE;

    if($user_lan==’de’) {
    ## German
    $redir_url = “http://www.germanlanguagepageurl.com”;

    } elseif($user_lan==’fr’) {
    ## French
    $redir_url = “http://www.frenchlanguagepageurl.com”;

    } elseif($user_lan==’it’) {
    ## Italian
    $redir_url = “http://www.italianlanguagepageurl.com”;

    } elseif($user_lan==’es’) {
    ## Spain
    $redir_url = “http://www.spanishlanguagepageurl.com”;

    ## US traffic or Rest of world not defined above
    } else {
    $redir_url = “http://www.yourmainpageurl.com”;

    }

    header(“Location: $redir_url”);
    exit;

    ?>

    As you can see from the above two examples, monetizing your international foreign traffic is a relatively easy step and, with the right sponsors to send this traffic to you will be able to reap the profits of countries that other webmasters are not targeting yet.

    Geo Targeting – Overview.

    When all is said and done geo targeting can be a cost effective way to increase your bottom line profits, whether using a free method as described above or, using one of the many filtering services available on the net you should start to monetize your global surfers. One thing you should also consider however is that far from sending your international traffic to a dialer you should search around and find a good mix of adult affiliate programs with a variety of localized paysites, this in itself will enable you to see just how much traffic you have been wasting by using dialers in the past and, it will also allow you to realize the full potential of your new found geo targeted adult traffic.

    Article written by Lee