Geo advertising is the practice of delivering ads based on geographic location of the targeted population. This location based advertising targets localized customers through banner ads, organic searches or pay per click campaigns. There are many networks that allow advertisers to use IP geolocation to target customers based on their geographic locations.
Geo location is among the most important elements that marketers can adopt for their location marketing. In the conventional world, those who want to target New York residents pay for advertising space in one of the city’s popular local dailies. In the digital world however, an assumption cannot be made because ads can be viewed from New Zealand as they are from California in the United States.
What are the benefits of geo targeted advertising?
Beyond reducing costs and ensuring that ads run in the areas that advertisers sell their products, geo advertising provides marketers with a unique opportunity to reach specific audience. The online world provides for a sophisticated measurement and personalization that wasn’t possible when traditional media is used. Also, with the high level of penetration of mobile devices, remarkable granularity and exactness which it provides in terms of geo-targeting, marketers have found a powerful way of reaching a potential population that’s within a specific area.
How can we use IP geolocation to perform geo advertising?
In an online environment, servers look at the IP addresses of the users and find out their specific locations. Behind the scenes, geo advertising servers maintain a massive database with the IP address of every country, state and the postal code from IP2Location.com.
Whenever a request is made, the IP address is collected straight from the HTTP request header then the table is queried and the location data is found. Subsequently, an advertisement that suits the criteria is picked. Geolocation have a network of servers which send out connection requests or pings to one another and this makes it possible to cover certain locations based on their IP addresses.
When posting an ad, a marketer is free to choose important parameters depending on how he or she wants the ad to be seen. Geotargeting makes it possible to choose the exact areas that online traffic can see the ads based on their IP addresses. The platforms determine which internet service providers own which ranges of IP and since an IP tends to be unique to a specific location, this important information is stored in the database and used effectively for geo advertising and geo targeting purposes. This is important because they can target their ads on areas where there is huge demand for their products and where they feel they can get value for their money.