subject: Seo Experts Target Geo Targeting Tactics [print this page] Never before had the need been felt for more aggressive and direct form of advertising than it does today. The boom in the internet economy is akin to the rise in the level of global warming, with the only exception that the former is for the better and the latter is for the worse.
A recent technique of e-marketing, Geo-targeting is fast gaining momentum amongst the media buyers as well as media sellers as both the parties look for innovative direct marketing solutions. The businesses pay the ad firms for every clicks their ads generate and the advertisers employ such techniques as pay to click programs whereby they pay a cent or two to the denizens to just click on the ad, irrespective of the consideration that the ad is targeted on him/her or not.
Geo-target marketing protects the interests of the media buyers from such practices as well as enables the advertisers to provide more focused and successful ad campaigns to their clients. It facilitates the positioning of ad in such a way that they are confined to a particular geographical area or demographic to which the product is relevant and of use. For eg, a pink mink coat, however beautiful and gorgeous it may be, does not hold any potential to be sold to a female living in the equatorial region. But if the ad for the same is displayed to her, she will nevertheless click and check it out, and you will lose money without any potential for ROI. Geo-targeting will prevent exactly this by not displaying the ads in the regions where they are not relevant.
In geo-targeting, the ads are placed according to the ISP number, IP address mapping, region code, postal code, etc. There are basically four techniques by which geo-target marketing can be achieved:
* Local Media: the ads are placed on the websites of local newspapers and magazines. It gives the most accurate results as only the localities would be interested in visiting the websites of these media. But it also happens to be the most expensive amongst all the techniques deployed.
* City Guides: These serve as movie or shopping guides to the residents of a particular city and are considered ideal for placing relevant ads in each category.
* Zip code Targeting: perhaps, more accurate than Local media advertising, Zip code targeting is not possible to be done on a wide scale because not many consumers are comfortable sharing their personal details such as country and zip code, even though some sites do require them to furnish these details.
* IP mapping: lots of marketers are riding on the waves of internet technology by tracing the IP address of the server from which the request is coming to the country of its origin, through a query against the IP database which is imperative to be maintained by them. But IP targeting is estimated to be only 95% efficient as many organizations have branches in multiple countries but have a single registered IP address.
Media buyers must look into the measures used by the advertisers to geo-locate their ads and remember that the data given by the user, such as Zip code and region codes, is more efficient than the data that is observed and based on search patterns, etc.
