Geo-location analytics, or location intelligence, is a powerful tool for marketers, developers and businesses in general. It’s defined as the analysis of IP address data to determine a user’s location, which gives a great deal of insight into the user, their behaviour and opportunities.
The use of geo-location analytics is nothing new. In fact, it’s been around for a while. But as with many other technological innovations, the fourth industrial revolution is pushing boundaries. In this blog, we’ll discuss how we’re innovating geo-location analytics and how publishers and advertisers are benefiting from it.
Geo-location analytics to establish LSM data
So here’s what we’re doing: by partnering with South Africa’s top publishers, we’ve built up quite a network. And across this network, we’ve placed tags on websites. These tags put cookies on a visitor’s browser when they visit one of the sites. The cookies enable us to track user behaviour and location – but this is nothing new.
The exciting part comes in when you establish a home location instead of the location at the time of visiting. Once you establish a user’s home location on a granular level, you can determine information such as LSM metrics, race, language and income bracket.
And as these are all South African targeted websites, the vast majority of visitors are South African, which gives us a genuinely local audience. And of course, all of this data is anonymised.
How do advertisers benefit?
If you’re creating display campaigns in South Africa, you never really know where your ads are shown and who is seeing them. Advertisers who want to compete in the South African market and need to promote ads to South African audiences, can benefit greatly with the geolocation tools we’ve developed. With advanced geo-location analytics, advertisers will have the ability to create audiences based on economic and demographic data, leading to improved targeting of your campaigns. Your ads are shown to a more relevant and economically viable target audience, which translates into a higher click-through rate. Another benefit is that the amount of your budget being spent on clicks from users outside your target audience will decrease.
What does this mean for publishers?
As a publisher, access to audience metrics is critical. With data on your user demographic, economic and lifestyle level, you can develop a more in-depth picture of your audience at any given point. This information can be used to model content to specific demographics, or if you sell products or services on your website, will provide a clear understanding of your targeted audience.
It can guide your content creation and marketing strategy to achieve the audience metrics you are aiming for. If your website is on the Google Display Network, the data gathered will also allow for more targeted ads to be served on your site. That means the ads displayed on the website will be more relevant and appealing to the users by matching ads to your users’ geographic and lifestyle data. More relevant ads have high chances of translating into a better click-through rate on your website, and so your ad revenue will increase.
Ultimately, accessing more data that assists you in creating tailored content for your audience and enabling more targeted ads to be displayed on your website, will result in your users having an improved user experience.
There are many other ways in which location intelligence is being innovatively used to improve our lives, but if you’re a publisher or advertiser, this is where you start with utilising this tech.
