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How to Increase ROI
by Geotargeting
Your Campaigns
This is the decade for geotargeted local advertising. If the '90s were the decade to get
online and establish an online presence, and the 2000s were the decade to get global
and bring that online presence to the world, then the 2010s can easily be defined as
the decade to get local and bring the global presence to the local user.
Monster-sized corporations like Google and Yahoo deliver content and advertising to
their users based on location. Social networking sites and apps like Foursquare and
Yelp are appealing to local users. Neighborhood businesses, such as a local dentist's
office or a dry cleaner, are able to advertise online in their local markets. Small and
medium-sized businesses can target multiple geographical areas and sites like
Groupon and DailyCandy offer local deals to local users.
Local is the new global.
Companies are noticing the trend and hopping on the geotargeted local-advertising
bandwagon. Global companies can no longer afford to relate to customers in Italy the same
way they relate to customers in Los Angeles. And smaller businesses benefit from targeting
advertising to locations outside of their own.
Where in this paradigm do you fit?
To some, getting local may seem like a local headache. It may seem like a lot of work.
It may seem like needless hassle. And, in this case, it seems like the sum of its parts is
greater than the whole world and there is no easy guide to taking on that world.
However, in reality, geo-targeting your online advertising is not nearly as daunting as it
seems. Just follow seven simple steps:
1. Decide which geographies to target
2. Determine the right channels
3. Generate creative content
4. Create campaigns per geo
5. Validate
6. Test
7. Monitor
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How to Increase ROI by Geotargeting Your Campaigns
Introduction to Geotargeting
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Not all locations are right for all businesses, but many companies can broaden their audience
by targeting new locations. Businesses basically fall into one of two categories:
those that don't do any localized advertising (yet!), and those that already do some
geotargeting and are looking for more geographies to target.
For example, a website that sells sunglasses may already target online customers in
California and Australia. Adding advertising to other geographically targeted potential
customers may prove ROI-positive. In either case, you need to find which geographical
locations are right for your company. Here are two effective ways to determine this:
A
Conduct an internal analysis to determine
if your business is right for geographical targeting.
Analyze your current business by answering the following questions:
• Do you have customers that are from a specific area?
• Is your industry stronger in some geographies?
• Do your global campaigns return traffic results from certain areas more frequently
than others?
• Is your business seasonal in some areas but not in others? For example, bathing
suits may sell only in June, July, and August in Chicago, but could sell throughout the
year in Hawaii, or during December and January in Brazil and South Africa.
B Scope out your competition
After analyzing your business, take a look at what your successful competitors do (both
direct and indirect competitors are worth evaluating). Investigate whether they are
advertising to specific markets, research what their creative looks like, and discover
what their ad copy includes. Gather any intelligence you can. Uncovering such information
may be a little tricky. How can you check what geotargeting your competitor is
doing in the UK if you are in Canada?
You can ask a friend in the UK to do some searching for you. You can take a trip to
London to see for yourself. Or, if you don't have friends in every location you want to
research and your reconnaissance trips start to get expensive, you can enlist the assistance
of a good proxy network.
When you access sites through a proxy in the target location you are researching, you
can view the ads and content as if you are local. Now, you can stay in Canada and
research your competitors' advertising patterns in the UK as if you are sitting at a pub
on the banks of the Thames.
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How to Increase ROI by Geotargeting Your Campaigns
1. Decide which geographies to target
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Once you've determined the geographies to target, you need to determine which
channels to use. Most channels offer geotargeting capabilities, so selecting from them
is a matter of what is right for your campaign. You may already know which channels
are right for you, or you might need to test to know for sure. Consider the following
channels:
SEM: Google, Yahoo, and Bing all offer geotargeting options for their search ads.
Does your audience use search engines to find you?
Display: Web surfers click on banners when these banners are relevant to them.
Where can you put your banner ads?
Social networks: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Yelp, Foursquare, MySpace,
Friendster, Bebo, Orkut, StumbleUpon.com, Delicious, Meetup, Classmates...
Where does your audience "hang out"?
IM clients: Messenger, Google Talk, ICQ, Jabber
Is your product or service right for advertising to local users via instant
messaging clients?
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How to Increase ROI by Geotargeting Your Campaigns
2. Determine the right channels
Applications and services:
What kind of applications and services does your audience use (e.g., casino
games, Forex)?
3. Generate creative content
After you have set your geographies and channels, it is time for the critical step of
generating relevant creative. Your text ads, banner ads, and landing pages are all
important to your campaign's conversion.
Consider the following key points:
Make sure your creative appeals to your geographic audience. Perhaps even
mention (or show) the audience's country or city. For the sunglasses example (see No. 1),
how about "It's time for new sunglasses, Los Angeles!" or an image of sunglasses
reflecting the Hollywood sign?
Consider writing creative in the local language or slang. If you have a clothing website,
ads in the US can reference the cool new "pants" you offer, but in the UK you had better
refer to them as "trousers." Of course, running your English ads in Costa Rica or Spain may
be a good way to waste your "dinero."
All aspects of your campaign should carry the same look and feel, the same wording, and
the same offer. Your text, banners, and landing pages should all tie in to one another.
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Once all your research and prep work is done, you are ready to generate your campaigns.
Your budget will guide you on how big a campaign you can start with. Perhaps getting
started in only a couple of new geographies and channels is right for you. Or, if your
budget allows, maybe you are ready to take on the world from the get-go.
Regardless of the amount, you will invest time and money in creating your campaigns.
That should prove to be a very wise investment. The world of online advertising has
reported time and time again how lucrative it can be to geo-target.
Once you launch your campaigns, you will be investing more time and money into
generating traffic. Considering all of this investing, it's absolutely critical to look out for
your investment. This brings us to the most important part of your geotargeting validation.
5. Validate
In real estate, the three most important aspects of purchasing property are location,
location, location. Similarly, the three most important aspects of location-based geotargeting
are validation, validation, validation!
You have intensely researched and selected your geographies. You have extensively
examined and chosen your channels. You have poured over creative and carefully crafted
your campaigns. So, are you going to let anything stand between you and a perfectly
orchestrated campaign?
Sadly, many campaigns fail at this exact point. Having been prepared properly, some
campaigns are launched and given a life of their own. They are not properly tested and
validated. That is simply irresponsible. Here are some examples of the many obstacles that
may hinder your campaign's performance at this point:
Your French audience is mistakenly shown Portuguese ads
Your ads showing a price in British pounds send visitors to a landing page
showing US dollars
Your ad with the Hollywood sign reflected in the sunglasses is displayed in
Hollywood, Florida
To validate effectively, you must be able to mimic your audience's activity. Sitting in San
Francisco and targeting users in the Netherlands is nice, conceptually. However, you must be
able to step into your users' proverbial (wooden) shoes and experience the Internet as they
do. Accordingly, you must arm yourself with a good proxy network that delivers a private and
secured browsing experience—and, more importantly, guarantees that it is transparent.
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How to Increase ROI by Geotargeting Your Campaigns
4. Create campaigns per geo
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6. Test
Once you have launched and validated your campaigns, test them. This is the only way to
find out if they will work for you. Set aside a relatively small budget for a relatively short time
period to test the effectiveness of your campaigns.
If at first a specific geography does not seem to be performing, some campaign tweaking
may be necessary. It may not be the geography that is ineffective; it could be other elements
of your campaign (e.g., the channel, the creative, the offering). Once you feel confident that
you have tested all the elements and your campaign is validated and operating properly,
increase your budget and run with the campaign!
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How to Increase ROI by Geotargeting Your Campaigns
Many free and hacked proxies will manipulate the ads and content you see. And if actual ads
and content are what you are trying to validate, that approach harms you more than it helps
you. Instead, invest in a good proxy service that can help you validate, test, and monitor
geotargeted campaigns.
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7. Monitor
Never get complacent about monitoring your campaigns. Whether your campaign has been
performing well for two weeks or five months, mistakes can happen at any point and can be very
costly.
Always monitor your campaigns.
Test.
Re-test.
Then test again.
You will find mistakes. The more diligent you are about monitoring your campaigns regularly, the
less costly those mistakes will be. Your proxy network will become your best friend for this step,
so make sure it is user-friendly and flexible.
Conclusion
If your business is ready for growth and you have done all of your homework in the above steps, you are
ready to get local. It requires an investment of time and money, but when done properly, it will return
this investment many times over.
About BIScience
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BIScience offers validation, measurement, and analysis solutions for online advertising
activities. These SaaS solutions maximize our clients’ profits by providing insights and analytics
of their online presence compared to specific competitors and entire market segments, trends,
and budget analyses. We offer valuable solutions for clarifying and evaluating online marketing
activities across all channels: display, mobile, social, SEM, etc.
All of our solutions are secure, reliable, intuitive, and usable. BIScience offers flexible packaging
to accommodate the needs of small and medium businesses as well as large enterprises.
How to Increase ROI by Geotargeting Your Campaigns
One of BIScience’s products is GeoSurf™
GeoSurf™ delivers the local perspective. With it, your computer or mobile can surf locally
without being local. Online media professionals now access a local browsing experience from
high value geo-targeted countries and United States metro areas. The product was launched
in 2009 and currently provides a browser add-on, VPN client and an iPhone/Android solution.
Our clients use GeoSurf™ to:
Validate and monitor the accuracy of campaigns
See who is bidding on traffic sources for browsers, mobile, and desktop
applications (display, affiliate, video, in-game, in-text, FacebookAds,
application display, virtual goods, etc.)
Discover and profile new advertisers and campaign ideas
Optimize campaign offerings
Analyze the full geo-specific ecosystem of any online channel prior
to launching campaigns
Confirm proper campaign deployment in real time
Ensure brand compliance and track affiliates’ activities
Get a free trial of GeoSurf™ for all of your geotargeting needs
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