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.

Don't Get Scammed

There has, over the last couple years, been an incredible amount of scam web sites offering people everything from AdSense tips, prebuilt "AdSense optimized" web sites and other various tools promising to start pulling in thousands of dollars a month for doing nothing. These have gone by various names, such as The Google Money Tree, The Google Money Machine, and various other names.

many of these ask for $1.95 (or thereabouts) for a CD to be mailed to you that contains their tips, web sites, web content or whatever. What happens to most people is that they do not read the fine print of the web site before ordering. This fine print also states that you authorize them to take around $70 a month for continuing support of this web site, or additional tips and tricks.

With signing up you authorized it so it's very difficult to dispute the charges and many people wind up simply having to cancel the credit card they used to stop the charges. What also happens is they come to the Google AdSense forums and kick and scream at Google for ripping them off even though Google has nothing to do with the scams, they are simply getting their name ripped off.

Google has, and continues to, shut these sites down when they can, but the scam continues under new names all the time.

People, there is nothing easy about making money advertising online, and Google AdSense, and no templates web site is going to bring you traffic if hundreds of other people have those same web sites from ordering the same CD.

Don't fall for it. AdSense is free, and earns you exactly what your site is worth.

Tried Microsoft Ads Again

A little over a week ago I decided, after getting a really cool stainless steel water bottle in the mail from Microsoft, to try their ad system again. I would very much like to see Google AdSense have some sort of competition in the marketplace, so I would really like to see it work. I vowed rto give it a month of my time, and run it as a direct A/B test against AdSense.

I have to break my vow in this regard. With the economy in the shape it is, I simply can't afford to loose any more money than I have.

I still contend that based strictly on the available toolset, Microsoft beats AdSense in every way. They have better design tools, better filtering tools, a smoother ad creation process and better reporting. But, the money and CTR simple isn't there.

Bother systems suffer from spam ads gaming their systems, and in any fully automated system, that is bound to happen, but at least Microsoft provides a more robust filtering system, allowing not only target URL's to be filtered, but also keywords, and from my experience in this last 10 or so days, the keyword filtering works great. Adsense has category filtering, but I suspect that can be gamed as well. keyword filtering would be tough to game because the publisher is filtering directly against their ad text itself.

Microsoft also differentiates between image ads and Flash ads, whereas AdSense has "image ads" contain both. Many publishers would accept images, but not Flash, as they can contain audio as well.

The design tools have a lot of option in text color, font weight, border option including dashed borders, drop shodaws from different directions and more. I generally don't recommend using borders myself, but for those that do, it's a great feature.

The system also contain A/B testing tools to test different color designs side by side and report on the performance of each. Very cool!

All that said, at the end of the day, during my 10 or so day test, I made as much money as I do in one normal day with AdSense, well, not even that really. So, in the end, with all the greatest tools possible, the money still isn't there.

So, with that, back to AdSense I go, and maybe supplement the downturn in PPC prices by saving a space for CPM ads.

Geolocation Web Services

I have been very interested the last few months in geolocation for target advertising, visitor identification and the like. I have found it's very easy to get your own database of IP ranges associated with countries of origin with free tools like IP2Nation and other such things. The harder part, it seems, is to get down more granular than that. Those databases start getting very large and costing a lot of money.

While searching around for different tools I stumbled across a very cool little web service called geoPlugin that does all the heavy lifting for you. You simply instantiate the object in whatever language you choose and grab the array of info coming back to you.

geoPlugin has documentation for using it in JavaScript, PHP, JSON and XML. The data it returns about the given IP is the city, region, area code, dma code, country code, country name, continent code, latitude, longitude, currency code, currency symbol and currency converter. Pretty amazing...and does it all free.

In addition it has a "nearby" function that will return the names of neighboring cities. Could be incredibly useful for business directory types of uses.

If anyone is looking to implement geolocation for any reason, I highly recommend checking out geoPlugin.