Geotargeting became a commonplace term in 2002 when it comes to the subject of targeted marketing and site traffic management. Knowing where you customers are coming from and where they are going to as they pass through your site can help you, as it has already helped many webmasters, find "holes" where you lose visitors (hence, lose sales). This info about a customer's IP address and web browser will guide you in your attempts to "plug" those holes by offering a more interactive experience.
New tools are now surfacing on the market to help webmasters harness the power of identifying their visitors and serving them the best end user experience possible, without using extremely complex database programming. Geotargeting traffic management systems and tools are expected to revolutionize the way payment options, content, and advertising models are served to web site visitors, especially in the Internet industry.
Why is Geotargeting Important?
The ability to detect the geographic location and other demographic information of a web site visitor has become more critical to webmasters now than ever before. Now that the Visa and MasterCard card acceptance regulations have changed and concerns about credit card fraud have grown, serving a user payment options based on factors like country of origin and native language has become a valuable factor for increasing sales conversions. Still more importantly, from a legal aspect, content access limitations based on geographical region (such as not allowing visitors from Nevada to surf your online drug store, as the sale of prescription drugs online is now illegal in that state) will be essential to keeping conversion rates profitable and sites legal.
As more and more countries and citizens around the world gain access to the world wide web, English speaking Internet audience becomes the fastest shrinking sector of users. It is estimated that by the end of 2003 there will be 510 million non-English speaking web users compared to 270 million English speaking. That means over 60% of all web users will not speak English.
Another factor is that many credit card processing services will not accept transactions from countries where fraud and charge back's are disproportionately widespread and where conflict resolution can be complicated. According to the new Visa regulations, "sponsored merchants" and merchant account holders are responsible for their own charge back ratios when compared with their own sales, rather than the collective sales of the third party processor (ISPS). Keeping fraud levels minimal can start with serving of user-specific payment options based on demographics. For example, if you know that all your charge back's come from Russia , you will eliminate credit cards as a payment option and redirect visitors from Russia to a sponsor or dialer program.
Targeting by Location & Language
Geotargeting software like GeoRedirect ships with built in databases that contain information about IP blocks and the structure of the global Internet by regional IP's and other collected and updated data. An IP address will act link a GPS Signal with your server acting as the Satellite. When a visitor enters your site, you can detect their geographic location instantly. Detection by domain country codes is also made possible as GeoRedirect includes an extensive database with known country codes and the IP ranges they belong to. This helps to manage traffic with up to 95% accuracy.
Now let's say you are receiving a lot of traffic from Italy and you have a multilingual web site or translated sponsor site you want to send these people to, since obviously the most common language in Italy is Italian. The standard procedure here is having the visitors go to the main site and click the language they want. The software allows you to overstep this and directly send these Italian visitors to the Italian version of your web site or sponsor site.
Another example takes this concept even further. If you have a visitor from Germany and direct them to the German version of your site or to a sponsor, you'd better make sure you do not offer them a credit card payment option only, since it is a known fact that French and other European web surfers prefer to pay using a dialer. You can run GeoRedirect on any page of your site, so if you only want to run it on the join forms of your sites to be sure that every visitor is served the most viable payment option, than this traffic management tool could increase your conversion rates by more than 20% simply by reading the user by IP. As we all know, traffic is the major key to the success of a web site and being able to account for and control that traffic is a big victory.
Increasing Your Bottom Line
With the U.S. economy in a constant state of flux, increasing your potential customer base is going to be an important part of continued success in the online business. If your customers originate from many regions around the world, your sales no longer have to remain dependent upon U.S. economic trends and you may never have another "summer slowdown" again.
In addition to traffic management detection and redirection of your visitors based on common variables, GeoRedirect is also a complete web statistics program tracking information about your visitors to help you make the best decisions as long term trends and user patterns become evident. From basic data such as total visitors, unique hits, browser stats, domain and country stats, to even knowing how many users are Java enabled, you can derive the most important information about your audience to help enhance and further develop your site for a customized user experience. This will bring you repeat visitors and an equal chance to convert sales regardless of geographic and demographic variables. If you know that a certain portion of your traffic is unconvertible, you no longer have to waste money in bandwidth pushing this traffic; simply direct these visitors to a sponsor that can convert it.
Most geotargeting software like GeoRedirect runs on the web server and presents no difficulty in installation. Now you can finally take the time to filter and control your traffic so you can identify which traffic sources work best for your sites when it comes to making marketing decisions. With the right tools in place you can now have a great solution for your traffic and will likely make your money back tenfold in no time. Geotargeting software can make your site a smoother running selling machine and help push your web mastery to a whole new level!
To learn more about GeoRedirect, geotargeting traffic management software system and its applications, please visit GeoRedirect.com
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