Personalize Your Website and Digital Marketing using IP Address

What is IP targeting? Well, IP stands for Internet Protocol Address. IP is a unique string of numbers assigned to every device that connects to the internet. Okay, enough of the technical jargon and on to the important stuff: using IP address to do amazing things with your next marketing campaign.

It's no secret that finding your target audience online is easier than ever. With tools like Google Analytics, Kiss Metrics, Facebook Audience Insights and other data visualization apps, understanding your audience is always just a few clicks away. The important difference with IP address is that it's tied to location, and more, IP address isn't a guess or part of a venn diagram: when smart marketers target based on IP address, they are doing so with precise accuracy.IP addresses can be used to target and change content for customers at a granular level. Imagine if instead of only showing ads to a particular region, city or state, you could choose to show your digital ads only to people working for a particular company or attending a certain event. In this article, we’ll cover four ways you can use IP location data to customize and personalize your online marketing campaigns, and also show you tools to personalize your existing website! The goal here is to deliver a remarkable on-page experience without annoying pop-ups or lazy, disruptive advertising.

Location Targeting, Location Targeting, Location Targeting

Not all website visitors are created equal (sorry founding fathers of the internet). Messages that resonate with one part of the country might be misunderstood or ignored by another. When website visitors come to your site, you want to provide them with the best experience possible: it’s why Google rewards search results with high click-through rates: content is always king … but being relevant and matching a user’s intent is close to the throne.How can you use IP address data to personalize your website? Someone visiting your website from Texas will see different product, testimonials and images than someone visiting from Wisconsin. As customers, they care about different products.

Fine-Tuned Targeting

The image above shows a custom parameter drawn inside the dashboard of GeoFli's IP targeting tool. Anyone visiting from an IP address within this location will see different content. Location targeting solely by IP can be as granular as you’d want, from state-sized areas, all the way down to a college campus.  By using a third-party application like GeoFli, you can use location data to map out the boundaries of a school, to show dynamic, tailored content to students, faculty and staff. What happens when a website visitor is seeing personalized website content? Time-on-site increases, bounce-rate decreases and conversion rates increase.

Conference Attendees

IP location targeting doesn’t have to be a long-term endeavor. Maybe you just want to customize content and advertisements for a weekend during a major conference or meeting. By using IP targeting, you can easily show the individuals attending a marketing seminar, job fair or college fair specific content or ads based on the hotel or convention center’s location. Facebook, AdWords and other popular online marketing tools allow you to focus on specific areas of a city. Content replacement tools like GeoFli allow you to take that marketing strategy a step further on your existing website (works on your existing CMS) with personalized content based on location. For example, if you have a booth at a large conference and someone visits your website, they might see your face and contact information: Visit with Tyler at the Minneapolis Convention Center this weekend!

Better Social Media Ads

You probably already know where the people who are seeing your social media live, but are you really showing the message to the right people? And if you are, is your messaging consistent all the way through your site? By using Google Analytics in concert with a geotargeting app like GeoFli, you can be sure the people who are seeing your ad on social media are seeing the same messaging and artwork all the way through to the end of their visit. You can even take this one step further, by A/B testing the ads you show on social media to refine the message that you show visitors from a particular location on your site. Maybe you’ll find that people in Florida spend the most money on your site, but they only buy one or two items. With that data in mind, you can show social media ads about those products to people in Florida, and when they click through to your site, they’ll see useful content connected to their location. Testimonials based on IP address, products that sell at a higher conversion rate to Floridians and a sales representative they can contact in their hometown. Cool, right!

Of course, these are only a few things that location-based targeting has to offer.