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There
has never been a better way to redirect your web visitors
to the correct pages based on their location, thus matching
their region with the offers that are available for them,
their own language or their local laws and jurisdiction
... until now. |
GeoTargeter
Pro Geotargeting Software
by
Gordon Goodfellow
GeoTargeter Pro
Date:
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GeoTargeter
Pro allows your web visitors to go to any page you like
from the same link depending on which country, state
or province they are located. |
Back
in 2007 I had a dilemma.
I
discovered that a large proportion of my website visitors were
from inappropriate countries to be eligible for the landing pages
that they were clicking to. This was reducing ROI, and I knew
that if I could just get those people to the right landing pages
automatically I could recover all that lost revenue and increase
my bottom line significantly.
As
I’m based in the U.K most of the business I do tends to
be for the U.K. market. But, like most Internet marketers based
in the U.K., I discovered quite early that a lot of the traffic
I was getting was from the United States. This seemed reasonable
enough. After
all, we share the same language (kind of) and there are more Americans
using the Internet than there are Brits, so it seemed quite natural
that a large proportion of my sites’ visitors would be from
the other side of the Atlantic.
I
run several financial websites. Financial services tend to be
geo-specific. If you live in the U.K you can’t (usually)
take out a loan or a credit card or an insurance policy in the
U.S. or France or any other country, for that matter, apart from
the U.K. That meant that the program I was promoting was not eligible
to the majority of my site visitors, as the majority were American
based, presumably using the same or similar keywords to search
as my British visitors, and ending up at my site. In fact, there
were people from all over the place turning up at my sites. Below
is a screenshot of a real-time visitor report from Statcounter,
in the hour just previous to writing this, to one of my sites, showing their actual locations:
Globally
Based Web Visitors

As
you can see, some were as far afield as India! So I was wasting
all those visitors because they were not eligible for the financial
services which were only available for U.K. residents. They were
wasting time - I was wasting money.
Most
of the misplaced visitors were from the United States. Surely
they could be sent to a web page that would be of more benefit
to them and to me at the same time ...?
I
had a solution quite quickly. I simply joined an affiliate program
run by a U.S. company which I could run in tandem with my U.K.
based program. That way my U.S. visitors could go to the U.S.
program and I would be able to monetize that traffic as I would
be providing the link from my own site. They would click on the
link that said something like “U.S. residents click here”
and off they would go to the U.S. based program.
But
then I noticed something strange happening. On checking the data
I saw that some people were joining my opt-in U.K. lists who had
American based IP addresses. I also found that some people joining
the opt-in lists associated with my U.S. programs had British IP
addresses.
So
what was going on? It seemed that a reasonable chunk of people
were joining the wrong list!
The
most acute exhibitors of this tendency were people who joined
my debt consolidation programs. People living in the U.S. were
joining the U.K. program, and were being weeded out as being unsuitable
because they didn’t live in the U.K. At the same time, people
living in the U.K. were joining the U.S. program and were being
weeded out because they didn’t live in the U.S.
These
were people who had severe debt problems. Could it be possible
that the sort of people who had severe debt problems would tend
to include the sort of people who were unsure about which country
they lived in? Go figure.
So
it seemed that merely putting a link labelled U.S. and another
link labelled U.K. just wouldn’t do the trick. Some people
just would not click the correct link. So I had to think of something
else.
Announcing
Geo-Targeter Pro Redirecting Software
After
a few days I came up with the solution. And it was a solution
that was foolproof as it did not depend on people clicking on
the correct link. In fact they didn't even have to know where they actually lived! It worked
entirely through an automated process which my site visitors didn’t
even have to think about. I love automation!
Big
sigh of relief!

I’d
figured out that I could redirect my visitors based on their location
according to the IP address of their computer. I could install
a script on a PHP file and have it call a database of IP addresses.
That way they just had to end up at the correct
landing page.
Now
the trouble with something like this is that it tends not to stop
there. If you know that there is A to Z then why stop at C or
D? What about the people in Australia, New Zealand, South Africa,
Malta, Singapore or Belize? Do you think they would like to end
up at a page which offered them all sorts of interesting things,
only to be told that they were not eligible because of where they
lived? Of course they wouldn't.
Nor
do I like losing money because of that.
English
is an official language or is predominantly spoken in no fewer
than 60 countries. Now what if there were slight variations on
a product or service, but nevertheless it was fine to communicate
this in English? Wouldn’t it be great to be able to redirect
people in all those different English-speaking places to a web
page made specifically for them, to tell them about the product
or service with sight alterations to handle differences in specifications,
pricing, currency, name and address of local supplier, differences
in legislation and any other things that were relevant to their
own region?
You
bet it would!
Geo
Targeting: A Must-Have For Multi-Country Affiliate Programs
If you
are an affiliate promoting offers through a network which has
several different programs for different countries (this is especially
true of CPA networks) then the chances are that you are losing
out on all the international traffic that clicks on your affiliate
link. Those people are not going to go to the offer because, for
them, the offer does not exist. Instead they will see some kind
of 'Not Available In Your Area' page, leading to some lame offer
that they are not interested in.
With GeoTargeter
Pro these people will click on the very same link and go to a
perfectly valid offer appropriate to their own location.
Let's
take as an example an affiliate program from one of the many CPA
networks which has multi-country affiliate offers. If you are
based in the U.S., as a huge proportion of affiliates are, then up till now you're
only able to direct traffic from the U.S. through your link to
the U.S. affiliate program. But what if you used GeoTargeter Pro
to redirect traffic from just one link
so that the appropriate landing pages were arrived at according
to your visitors' locations? Your revenues will increase roughly
as follows: