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Geo-Targeting Primer - Part I - Users
By Cameron Ferroni | March 17, 2008
Over the next few weeks I’m going to focus a little more on helping folks understand some of the key concepts around Local. I’ll apologize up front to those of you who are already deeply steeped in the technical opportunities and challenges. For those of you that aren’t, hopefully this will be helpful, as always, please feel free to leave comments/suggestions/ideas and corrections.
This month, we’ll look at Geo-Targeting from the user perspective. First off, what is Geo-Targeting, other than a made up word that I never seem to spell correctly (at least according to SpellCheck). Geo-Targeting as it applies to our industry refers to Geographical Targeting - namely, trying to display appropriate content (ads, listings or other) to a user by attempting to determine where exactly the user is located. So as an example, if you were a user in Seattle looking for a new car, it would apply to both the listings you were looking at (cars located in Seattle are most interesting, one would assert), as well as any ads that may appear on the page (car dealers that serve Seattle, as an example). Now, this seems like a simple concept, and in the offline world, you see this kind of behavior all of the time - local businesses tend to advertise in local papers, and on local TV stations, and in general, those papers/stations tend to show their content in the local market. Sure there are fringe cases, like when I read the Globe and Mail when I’m in Seattle, but let’s just call those fringe cases and move on.
Now, to execute well on Geo-Targeting, it starts with knowing where the user is. Of course, this isn’t as easy as it may sound. Let’s start with the user location. There are 3 ways that sites attack this today, and all of them have their challenges. The first, is called “Reverse IP”. In English, what this means is that there are any number of services/databases available that can take an IP Address, and try to tell you, based on that IP Address, where the machine that the user is using is located. Think of your IP as your computer’s phone number - by looking up the number, you can tell where someone is located. This solution is nice because it requires 0 user interaction. Unfortunately there are any number of scenarios that can cause this to fail. The most talked about is the AOL problem - where thousands of AOL users all look like the same IP, since AOL routes all of their users traffic through a common set of servers, rather than exposing the actual phone number (think about this like an office phone, where there is one incoming number, and calls are routed by an operator, and all outbound calls come from the same number). But this crops up in lots of different places - people using wireless hubs in a cafe, shared internet service amongst hotels, multiple geographical distinct office locations that all go through one corporate network etc - all of these can result in IP addresses showing up that are actually very geographically distant from the user. As a result, you could be sitting in a hotel in New York browsing the net, and get content/ads about Florida. Kinda weird.
The second way that sites can deal with this is to have the user directly enter their location into the site. This is the most foolproof. The only real downside here is that it requires user interaction, and if the user changes location (say you are travelling on business), then the user has to change the location manually again.
The third way is to ignore where the User actually is, and focus on what content the user is actually looking at. So ignoring where I am, if I’ve specifically looked for Seattle Cars, I’m going to get ads for Seattle Cars, no matter what. In the explicit case, this works pretty well, and it handles the case of me living in Seattle, but if I want to find a restaurant in NY then having the ads be for restaurants in NY is probably the right thing. Unfortunately if this is the only solution, then if all I do is type in restaurants, then who knows what I’m going to get.
At the end of the day sites frankly need to handle all three to do the right things for the user. They should support Reverse IP when they can, they should allow users to change their location when necessary, and they should be smart when the user is looking at geographically specific content and display relevant content at that time. Next week we’ll take a look at the advertising side of this equation.
P.S. I committed 3 weeks ago to doing more locally and keeping you all posted. Suffice it to say that in the last 3 weeks I’ve taken 2 buses that I’ve never taken before, walked 2 different routes than I’ve ever walked, did 2 different run paths, tried 4 new local restaurants, and 2 new bars…..
Topics: Neighborhood, Web site, Local Advertisers, Advertising, Content |
March 21st, 2008 at 5:59 pm
For: Cameron Ferroni
Hello,
We Geo-Target in a slightly different way. We do use IP targeting sometimes but our primary tool is via Domain Names. i.e. HelloBoston.com HelloChicago.com HelloSeattle.com and 1500 more Hello”city” .com and another 1500 .mobi domains.
Our release the other day on how we are drilling down to the Zip and Neighborhood level within each of our city domains.
http://www.emediawire.com/releases/2008/3/prweb787514.htm
Clark Scott
502-387-5524