A Realistic Use of geoLocation Information with the eBay Partner Network

I had previously discussed a very cool geoLocation web service that I had started using for reasons of visitor control, as the web site had been experiencing problems in a very localized area.

I recently came upon another use for this service that may inspire webmasters of a very real, and wise use of such information.

Increasingly, the key to running successful advertising on your web site is to properly target the ads to the people that most want it. While few of us have as much demographic data on the average person as somebody like Google with their massive warehouse of historical data we do have something, one thing, that helps greatly, and that is visitor location.

I recently joined the eBay Partner Network, which is basically the affiliate program for eBay. When one joins this program they are given the option to show ads for any of the eBay web sites, and they have programs in the United States, United Kingdom, Spain, France, Italy and more.

This is an ideal use for ad targeting with geoLocation information. What I did was quite basic, but a very effective option. When a visitor hits the site, I load the web service and find out the country of origin of that visitor. Once you have the country, you can then store that country in a variable and use that variable for conditional displays of ads.

I have it set up where any country that has an eBay program available, shows their appropriate eBay advertisement, which is also populated with ongoing auctions via a keyword search. Then, any country that does not have an eBay service available to them, simple show some backfill ads, such as Google AdSense or some such thing.

In the case of a high traffic site you may want to store a cookie with the country information available to prevent the web service from needing to be hit on every page load. This will keep the web service from being overloaded, especially in the case of a free service like geoPlugin, it's simply a case of being respectful of a servers resources. I store country info in a cookie that expires every browser session. So any visitor, in theory, would hit the web service once for each visit, regardless of how many pages they view in any given visit.

I have not been doing this with the eBay ad for long enough to see how effective the system is, but I do know fellow webmasters that say they make far more with eBay's EPN than with AdSense or any other system like that, so I am hoping.