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Target your audience
Media buyers are continuously faced with new challenges posed by the new advertisers entering into the market. Advertisers tend to focus on their unique selling scheme and target specific markets. Niche specific companies often have a better chance of surviving in well established industries. Think of a situation when your product is meant for India only but someone sitting in London is clicking your ad and you are paying for that! No matter how fascinated that individual might be, you won't be able to sell anything and hence will not get any return for your investment. In such a scenario, targeted ad by geography is a tactic that a company might want to make use of.

 Geotargeted ad placements allow us to market a particular product to a defined geographic and cultural market. Each geographic region is essentially a niche market that can be targeted. Ads are generally served according to internet provider number, area code, or postal code; the ad server recognizes an appropriate user from a specified city, region, state, and/or country and serves accordingly (Posman 2000). One can even set up a campaign such that the ads will appear only within a radius of say, 100 km of Delhi. This could be taken a step further to target specific sites, but the costs incurred may not encourage this. With companies expanding physical boundaries, the need for geotargeted advertising is growing. Ads appealing to Bengalis may not appeal to Malayalis. Since besides the language barrier, cultural differences are also there. The web permits new options for geographic targeting, allowing marketers to respond to cultural differences.
 
Ways of Geo-Targeting
There are basically four kinds of targeting advertisers normally do on the Internet - websites of local media (newspaper, TV etc), city guides (like Times City), Zip code targeting and IP targeting (Meskauskas 2003). Advertising in local media usually have a high proportion of local in-market visitors, making them useful as vehicles for local targeting. The downside is that they often charge a higher CPM than other geo-targeting methods. City guides are good alternative for attracting an audience looking for something specific such as movies or shopping. Zip code targeting has the potential for being the most accurate. More and more sites are often asking for registration allowing advertising to be target based on zip codes. IP targeting has been the most long-standing method of using technology to target users of the Web based on geographic determinants. The accuracy of this kind of targeting depends on how accurately the technology vendor for the site you are advertising, maps on IPs to true geographic areas.
 
How Geo IP Targeting is done
Geo-IP software solution providers utilize various methods of geo-targeting (see Padmanabhan et al 2001). The simplest (and least accurate) methodology involves a simple lookup of WHOIS* records at Regional Internet Registries (RIRs). The Regional Internet Registries (RIRs) are responsible for allocating and assigning IP addresses to ISPs, organizations and end users in their designated geographical regions. There are five RIRs - each serving specific geographical areas worldwide, which are APNIC, ARIN, LACNIC, RIPE NCC and AFRINIC. Asia Pacific Network Information Centre (APNIC) is responsible for IP distribution in the Asia and Pacific region. Visit IP Addresses Explained to have an idea about IP addresses and the RIRs.

Another more accurate method of geo-targeting IP addresses is to make use of basic network tools - such as WHOIS*, ping, traceroute, nslookup and others. Using a network of servers to 'probe' the Internet, top-end geo-targeting solution providers can build a much more accurate Internet IP map.
 
Constructing IP-to-Country database
One can build and maintain his own free IP-to-country database based on WHOIS information. Simply visit the RIRs, download their text files, convert the data into appropriate column formats, create some SQL queries and you're done. Something very similar could be found at Create an IP-Country Database using PERL and MySQL.

The second 'category' of Geo-targeting methodology makes use of basic network tools, with solution providers likely using additional techniques to pinpoint the geo-location of website visitors. Typically, a network of servers will be used to 'probe' IP addresses around the Internet, in an effort to determine the precise geographical location of an IP address. An IP address does not inherently imply its location. An IP address can be used anywhere (although it may not be routable). Therefore, to map the IP address space accurately, one must use basic network tools to 'probe' IP addresses. See - A Primer On Internet and TCP/IP Tools and Utilities.

Using these network tools and other techniques, country-level accuracy in geo IP targeting could be achieved up to the level of 99 percent whereas at the state or city level the highest level of accuracy was reported to be 94 percent (Host Pronto 2005).

The best example of using Geo Targeting to increase customer ROI in India is being done by Mediaturf, India's largest interactive ad agency. Mediaturf has been using Geo Targeting successfully for the last four years to the benefit of their clients via their ad-serving process. Their research team also continuously monitors and analyses data to find out where a particular product is in demand and/or meant for, accordingly the ad is served. In addition, Mediaturf also serves ads according to the demographics, so that clients realize more ROI by paying for clicks generated from potential customers. This gives clients the freedom to concentrate on the other aspects of the business.
 
 
* WHOIS – pronounced as “who is”. Whois is both a database and a tool. A whois database is maintained by a domain registry, which contains pertinent information about domain names and their registrants (technical contacts, expiration date, etc.) Whois is also a tool used for accessing the various databases. Registrars offer the use of the whois tool to see if the name you would like is still available.
 
References
• Posman A. (2000) “The Benefits of Geotargeting”.

• Meskauskas J. (2003) “Think globally but act locally”. Available at: http://www.imediaconnection.com

• Padmanabhan V. N. and L. Subramanian (2001) “An Investigation of Geographic mapping Techniques for Internet Hosts”. Microsoft Research. San Diego California, USA.

• http://www.hostpronto.com/article/37
Regrets
Since the editor was on leave, do accept our sincere regrets for the delay of this issue of buzz ONLINE.
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