Geotargeting Advertising for Publishers

Recently I have been buying some advertising for some of my websites. I knew what geotargeting was before but had no idea how powerful it could be. So I have decided to integrate geo-targeting software with my own websites and offer it to my advertisers. I am hoping this will bring better results for the advertisers which in return brings more revenue for me.

Geotargeting in geomarketing and internet marketing is the method of determining the geolocation (the physical location) of a website visitor and delivering different content to that visitor based on his or her location, such as country, region/state, city, metro code/zip code, organization, Internet Protocol (IP) address, ISP or other criteria. (Definition from Wikipedia)

Geotargeting for Publishers:

What many publishers fail to do is to look at the advertising options that they offer from the advertiser’s point of view. If the advertiser is not getting a return on his investment, he will not renew the ad. By Geotargeting you can make sure that a much more accurate market segment is viewing the advertisers banner(s) and therefore produce much better results for him.

By Geotargeting not only you (the publisher) can attract a lot more advertisers, but you can also become a more successful affilaite.

Publishers can offer geotargeting on their website by using a software/script. There are already all-in-one solutions out there. Following are two of the most popular ones:

• OpenX: OpenX is a free, open source ad server that manages the selling and delivery of your online advertising inventory. You can get OpenX as a hosted service or as downloaded software.
• Adjuggler: AdJuggler empowers ad networks and ad agencies to manage their ads, geotarget their ads, track results and produce advertising reports.

OpenX is free for under 100 million impressions a month. The enterprise solution costs $1800/month.

Adjuggler does not have a free trial (maybe couple days of free trial). Their software costs $400/month for up to 10 million impressions. Also, Adjuggler requires you to sign a yearly contract with them.

OpenX has a 5 minute delay for all the new banners and changes which Adjuggler doesn’t.?? Also from my experience with Adjuggler and OpenX, Adjuggler has better customer service, but they also charge $400/month for it.

You can get free country tracking with OpenX (which? I’m still struggling to get it to work) but for geotargeting to specific states or cities you have to buy the databases (from a third party) for a flat fee upfront and a monthly update fee. However, it is still much less than $400/month.

It seems to me that with 100 million worth of free impressions a month, OpenX is the way to go.

Geotargeting for Advertisers:

If you are advertising, you should definitely look for websites that offer geotargeting. Facebook and MySpace offer that. If you do decide to use geotargeted ads you should first do some marketing research. You should first identify the market segments that are most interested in your product.

You can learn more about market segmentation from some of these articles.