Geo Targeting Is Just for Experts, Right?

While it is true to say that geo targeting is an advanced aspect of internet marketing, no it does not mean that only expert-level marketers can make use of it. Many people are a little bit confused by the phrase geo targeting, so perhaps it is best if we explain what it means first. Quite simply, it is all about identifying the location of visitors to your website as they arrive. Once you know what country or even what city they are from, you can choose to perform some specific actions to improve their experience while at your website. A simple example might be that if we detect that the visitor is from France, we can display a page written in the French language instead of our default English version. We might also display the French flag, or change some of the images to something more appropriate. Obviously that depends on the nature of the website, but normally it is possible to change anything appropriate to French visitors. Another type of example is search engines. If a person in Chicago perform an internet search for ‘hotel accommodation’, then the results displayed will be completely different to what would appear for somebody doing the same search in a different city or country. Search engines perform geo targeting all the time behind the scenes, and often without us realising it, to make our searches more appropriate. A look behind the scenes will help to understand what goes on. Once a visitor arrives at a website, the server checks the IP address of the visitor to determine where he or she is located. The server does this by searching through a database of all the world-wide IP address locations. Once a match is found, then the country is known, and the website displayed content can be adapted to suit. To try and implement geo targeting manually would indeed be something that only experts would normally try. While the fundamentals are generally easy to understand, the specifics are far too complex for the vast majority of us to implement manually. But there is a simple solution for all the rest of us, software. Software packages in this category have been developed and have come a long way in recent times. It is now very possible for any of us to implement geo targeting, just by using the right tools. The different products vary in price, but they are generally not considered too expensive. Once purchased, they are quite easy to learn, as the majority of them include a point-and-clink interface to handle the tasks. So if we want to display some French text when we detect that our visitor is from France, we can usually perform this with just a few mouse-clicks. We do have to prepare the different language text in advance and upload that page to our server, but the software will handle all the rest. Now that we see how relatively simple this process can be, the question remains, should we always use it. That will always depend on the nature of the website, what is it trying to sell or to achieve. If you are wondering whether you should try to make use of geo targeting, some good advice is to start by looking at your server logs, and where your traffic is originating from. You just might be surprised when you see all the different countries!