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Geotargeting: why it matters to marketers

April 27, 2003 |

It's 9 a.m. Do you know where your users are? For increasingly more marketers, that's not such a crazy question. Knowing where joins knowing who and what she likes.

It’s 9 a.m. Do you know where your users are? For increasingly more marketers, that’s not such a crazy question. As the Web becomes more measurable and we target our audiences more directly via psychographics, demographics, dayparts, and measures, knowing where someone is has become just as important as knowing who she is (or what she likes).

For a while now, it’s been possible to target users by location using a variety of “local” online properties. From Yahoo! City Guides to Citysearch to various city papers and business journals, targeting folks based on location is increasingly easier. Many major ad-serving companies incorporate IP-based geolocation that uses a combination of DNS resolution and proprietary lookup tables to locate users in place. Though this method usually won’t provide someone’s street address, it does at least place them in a metro area.

Why should you care where your users are outside cyberspace? Because even though a growing number of people buy online, much of what people do in their day-to-day lives occurs locally. Advertising anything that doesn’t require a national focus—regional services such as store locations and locally focused pricing—has been tough online. It’s an audience increasingly more of us need to reach.

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