Geo-Targeting Web Site Visitors

As the programmer here at Silver Square, it fell to me to figure out how to do geo-targeting of ads on the 60 Days To Change web site.  What’s geo-targeting you ask?  It boils down to making sure that the visitors to a website will see different ads based on where they live.  If you want to sell advertising space on your site, geo-targeting makes the deal much more attractive to your advertisers.

In this case Toyota is sponsoring 60 Days To Change.  They only want their ads to show up for visitors who live in certain zip codes.  So I set it up.  Call your friend in California and have them to go to 60daystochange.com.  Ask them if they see any Toyota ads.  They won’t.  The ads are geo-targeted for very specific areas of central Indiana.

That’s a very specific example, but you aren’t restricted to just looking at zip codes when you do geo-targeting.  You can show different ads based on your visitor’s city, time zone, or even area code.  (Do you feel like Big Brother is watching you surf the web?)  Since advertising space on the Internet is usually sold based on the number of eyeballs who see it, a banner on a web site is worth more when all of those eyeballs are in the sponsor’s area of operation.