Using geo targeting is a simple way to increase the conversion rates of your landing pages. By personalizing your landing pages in this way, you can increase the trust factor that visitors will have with your site. For you ppc coach members who haven’t heard of this before, geo targeting is basically a way to display different content on your page depending on the specific geographical location of a visitor.

This is mainly done by looking at the visitors IP address. The piece of code that I will be showing you basically attempts to match an IP address to a specific location (city, state, country). While it is not 100% accurate, it usually does a good enough job to be effective.

You will notice that geo targeting is used a lot on various fake blog (flog) sites. On the flog, it appears that the person promoting the product is near where you are from. You will also see it used in the promotion of dating sites where it appears that there are several good looking (and lonely) girls looking for dates in your city. Lastly, many CPA offers only allow you to promote offers to a specific area (like US only). With geo targeting, you can hide the offer from visitors of other countries and and try to monetize these visitors some other way.

An example Flog Using Geotargeting

An example Flog Using Geotargeting

The easiest method of applying geo targeting is to add a little bit of Javascript to the page. We are going to make use of a free javascript library that Google has made available that allows us to implement this. Hopefully this will not be too technical and the code examples will be simple enough for everyone to understand. You should be able to just copy and paste the code into your own page.

First, include the follow line between the head tags:

<head>
  <script src="http://www.google.com/jsapi" type="text/javascript">
  </script>
</head>

Next place the following code wherever you want to insert the geo-targeted text:

<script type="text/javascript">
  if (typeof(google.loader.ClientLocation.address.city) != null) {
     document.write("Find sexy singles in " 
	 + google.loader.ClientLocation.address.city + ", " 
	 + google.loader.ClientLocation.address.region);
  }
</script>

The document.write() function just outputs text to the page and when I load this page in my browser, I see the message “Find sexy singles in Dublin, CA”. While that is not actually the exact city I live in it is actually pretty close. You can also include get the country name by using google.loader.ClientLocation.address.country and the country code (ie. US, CA, UK) by using google.loader.ClientLocation.address.country_code.

The country code is a great way to target specific CPA offers on your landing page. Lets say you were promoting a ringtone offer that has both a US campaign and Australia campaign. You could do something like this:

<script type="text/javascript">
if (google.loader.ClientLocation &&
    google.loader.ClientLocation.address.country_code == "US") 
{	
  document.write("<a href='http://us-ringtoneurl.com'>US Ringtone Link</a>");
} 
else if (google.loader.ClientLocation &&
	google.loader.ClientLocation.address.country_code == "AUS") 
{
  document.write("<a href='http://aus-ringtoneurl.com'>Australia Ringtone Link</a>");
}
else
{
  document.write("<a href='http://other-ringtoneurl.com'>Ringtones For Everyone Else</a>");
} 
</script>

Whenever someone from the United States visits my page, they will get the US version link and a visitor from Australia will see the link meant for them. This example is probably more useful for plain SEO traffic rather than for PPC as most pay per click engines let you do ad based geo targeting anyway. As you can see, I am using US and AUS as the country codes. You can check out this list to see what other country codes you can use.

Using geo targeting is a nice way to boost your conversions when combined with different ppc coach techniques. I hope you found this short guide helpful for understanding how to implement geo-targeting on your landing pages. Be creative and I am sure you can find many uses for this.

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