Adwords Regional Targetting

[darren atkinson]

Hi all

My business is based in Hull, so I would only really like to target Hull internet users with a google adwords campaign. I have been through the adwords setup and it lets you input specific towns in the Uk to only target traffic in that area.

My questions is: has anybody used this before? and if so how reliable is it?

Google says it works out where users are based on IP addresses, this seems a bit strange to me, how does Google know where a specific IP is from? I understand all about IP's so I don't need a tutorial on them :wink:

I know that if someone where to put hull in the search term then it would also show my ads.

Any opinions / advice?

Thanks

Darren

[dcraigdc]

OK after much detailed Googling :D I have determined that the actual name for the technology behind this service is called Geolocation.

As I believe, software sources an IP address and converts it to an IP number. It then checks it against a HUGE database of previous IP numbers, postcodes etc in order to come up with the correct result.

The databases themselves were started up through cookies and when people registered their postcodes on sites (which were then compared to IP numbers). The accuracy of city based IP's varies from 60% - 80% and is never perfect as there is no formal source of information and some IP's are shared.

IP2 Location are one company who offer such a database and apparently are very competitive on cost.

Many merchants use geolocation as part of their fraud screening. If you have multiple local offices, you can point users to the correct one automatically. You could even target different people based on the demographics of the city that they are from. The uses of an IP location are endless.

As for Google's use of the technology, I would suggest from research it's certainly possible that this service is fairly accurate but not always 100% reliable which would explain why you sometimes get the odd result from somewhere nowhere near you.

[dan_moore]

IP addresses are allocated to countries in specific ranges; therefore from the IP address it is straightforward to look up in the database which country that IP address comes from.

When it comes down to the town or city level things are a lot murkier in that the IP lookup is less likely to be accurate, though is still accurate in around 60% in cases and will usually find the correct major city nearest your location.

There are some free geolocation databases out there which you can download and use via for instance a PHP script to determine where your visitors are coming from. I've used one to determine the country people come from for years, and then serve them a price in pounds, dollars or euros depending where they're from.

Cheers

Dan

[Magsite]

I've used the new google Analytics and it seems to work well. When I deliver leaflets in Newcastle I always aee hits from Newcastle, so it must recognise in the opposite way

Lisa