AdAdmin tracks impressions and click-through, delivers JPG/GIF/PNG banners and also HTML/JS scripts like Google Adsense and support responsive banners. One of the last features added is user geolocation, so you can deliver banners with a grographic target.
Geographic targeting allows you to promote local business and sell ads with better performances.
How does geo-location with IP addresses work?
A public database of IP ranges let us estimate the user location. Every IP address belongs to a network and the addresses are assigned to providers and telecommunication companies and stored in regional authorities databases.
This kind of databases are not accurate for services like a car navigation system, but are enough precise to be used in routers and firewall to geographically block users and can be used in local based marketing to deliver ads to a specific geographic target.
Sometimes these databases are upgraded by merging information from other services, for example: a smartphone connected to a network, with gps active, could read his IP address and send the gps position to a server and geo-locate that network in a precise latitude and longitude. So online there are both free database available and more accurate paid databases.
Geographic ad targeting with AdAdmin
IP2Location LITE offers two free databases (Country and Country-Region-City), AdAdmin v.3.90 can use both to deliver geo-referenced ads.
When you set up a banner with a geographic target, before showing the ad the software will search the user IP address in the database and if it’s in the correct IP range it will show the banner, else it will go on to the next ad.
Geo targeting requires just one more query for each banner to be shown, but if you have many concurrent users you should evaluate if it’s worth the hassle, so: which database should you choose?
Country? Region? or City geo targeting?
AdAdmin can use both DB1LITE (for Countries) and DB3LITE (with Country-Region-City data). The first has 187k records, the second has 2.9M records.
If your need to make ads just country related, than use DB1LITE. If you need to target ads on a region/city basis, us DB3LITE. But take a look to your analytics data: where are your users from? Take the first 3-4 countries that make traffic on your site and than clean up some data from DB3LITE and keep only the records really needed. In this you will probably speed up ad delivering.
How to activate AdAdmin geolocation service
To use geo location you have to download the IPs free database from IP2location LITE. The process is easy:
- Register on IP2Location and then go to Download page. Copy your personal “Download Token”.
- Choose which db use (DB1LITE or DB3LITE)
- Go to AdAdmin > Config > Settings, and change GEOIP_TOKEN to insert your personal Download Token and GEOIP_CSV to choose the database to use.
- Once you’ve added the token and choosen the csv click on the “Get the update” button, this will download the CSV data from IP2Location server to your server.
- Once the process has been completed, choose the CSV file from select list and click the Import button.
Geolocation based on IP addresses need regularly database update, because IPs change, so once in a month you need to come back to Settings page and repeat step 4 and 5.
