How To Use Geo-Targeting to Increase Website Conversions

Website optimization leads to increased conversion including newsletter registration, advertising impressions and other purposes. The optimization process includes scientific study of data created by the site. This data helps in decision making in the long run.

Optimizations helps in controlling the traffic that can be broken down to factors like age, organic to paid, screen resolutions and according to their country of origin, language they speak and culture they follow.

Do you know how to cater to a large and diverse range of audience? Traffic is cumulative word for visitors but you need to follow every visitor in order to increase conversion. Optimizing your site according to common factors like mobile and paid ads won’t help much.

Geo-Targeting could solve your problem of conversion tracking and increasing the conversion rates. If you follow the rules of geo-targeting, you will discover that segregating visitors according to their location, language and other factors provides real help in conversion tracking and increasing.

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Important elements to test

1. Language

Serve content in the native language of the visitors in addition to providing an entire funnel of languages to switch. Or you can use a KPI to test what performs better – native language or English.

Global brands serving global audiences emphasize native language but also provide language switch for better conversions.

2. Currency

Like language, you can test local currency of visitors like GBP, Euros and Dollars. To keep things simple, you can experiment with a popular product or keep it to one landing page. Now check how changing currency according to geo-location affects the conversion. Is it better?

International brands use currency selection to sell their products in targeted markets.

3. Offers relevant to local search

Follow visitors to their specific location within a country, state or city to make offers that match with their geo-location. But it needs a through research on the local market and needs for matching location with offers. The thing to measure is the behavior of visitors geo-targeted vs those served location-based offers. Is the new filter of any help? Study behavior of visitors that are served direct offers and that of those that are asked to choose their location.

Global brands that use location-based offers face a problem – limited availability of offers. Giving products/services that targeted customers can’t buy would create a negative impact on your brand. But you can think of a middle way to save your global brand image.

4. Match marketing

Geo-targeting would customize the marketing message to match with the location of visitors. The message would be displayed according to specifics – day, time and area – but you should check whether the message on your site is the same as served to geo-specific users. Send geo-targeted based traffic to geo-targeted based landing page and also to a generic page to check what converts better.

For example, Google Chrome campaign serves over 100 different ads in Europe and the traffic is sent to matching landing pages.

5. Visual elements

Like other elements, modifying visuals that include design can impact behavior. For example, using national flags can attract attention more than using similar design. Similarly, the changes can be made according to holiday themes. There are many examples like bright colors that attract visitors from specific cultures.

You can learn from brands that use visual elements as filters with geo-targeting and get best results for their products/services.

How to geo-target your site for testing?

Let’s learn the best practices in location-based testing.

1. IP Redirect   

IP based redirects like .htacess are httpd.conf simple and can be setup on servers in a hassle-free manner. It is easier to configure GeoIP API (MaxMind) with server and divert traffic according to IP addresses. Your job would be to ready different landing pages for conversion testing.

2. Pay-Per-Click Advertising

AdWords is also an easy yet expensive way of testing web pages. You can easily set campaigns for geo-targeting like language. Also, you can optimize the destination URLs of your ads for testing. For better results, you can set different landing pages. PPC advantage is that it gives fast result and generates a wealth of data that can give more insight on the location-based analysis.

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3. Geo Targeting Domains/subfolders

Google’s Webmaster guidelines suggest segmenting the webpages according the location targeting. You need to make location-based subdomains or subfolders like es.example.com or www.example.com/es/for Spain/Spanish. Use of a generic TLD (.com, .org etc.) is a better option for local search because the subdomains or subfolders have better chances of arriving in local search on Google. But it would require work on local searches. Another thing to note is that it won’t address language factor. It is suggested that you should look beyond geographic location in Google search results.

4. Geo Target Content

For geo-targeting with content, you can rely on the current traffic flow. Also, you can select content specific items for multivariate testing without worrying about the AdWords overhead and search marketing strategy.

Testing options

1. Coding

If you’re comfortable with working from behind the scene, you can use coding with PHP or JavaScript. Write codes to target a geolocation database and perform display logic accordingly. There are numerous examples to show how to accomplish this task.

2. Web Services and Tools

Sadly, there are little options available in web services and tools. For example, Omniture and other such tools could help in geo-targeting. Platforms like UnBounce and Visual Website Optimizer and even Google’s Website Optimizer provide little help in geo-targeting or web elements.

3. The Google Website Optimizer + BTBuckets solution

Using Google Website Optimizer and BTBuckets for free is a great way to do split testing. BTBuckets, as a real-time segmentation tool, allows segmenting of traffic and segment behavior of visitors. Running the Website Optimizer code is a process of segmenting.

BTBuckets provides a browser plugin that modifies the Google Website Optimizer code to process segmentation in the BTBuckets. Its advantage is that it’s fast and simple to use. You can rely on it for multivariate testing.

1. Start Google Website Optimizer and implement JavaScript code on your website pages to set up a test.

1. Set up geolocation buckets on BTBuckets.

III. Add the BTBuckets tracking tag to your site.

1. In case of a Bucket match, you need to modify the Website Optimizer tags to conditionally activate the tags.

1. Now the settings are complete to run the test.

How do you know it works?

Since you’ve started Get Targeting test, you would be eager to see the results of the experiment. The best way is to ask the visitors of targeted locations to give their feedback. But it would be a huge job that requires much time and more paperwork. Another way to test Geo Targeting results is to use global geo proxy network that allows web browsing from different global locations.

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There are several proxy services that allow browsing from over 100 countries and cities. But using browser extensions is more convenient. It allows location selection using a dropdown menu and browse in a hassle-free manner.

Global proxy tools have many advantages for geo-targeted conversion

See how the experiment is going.

Check the funnel to verify settings and make corrections, if needed.

Inspect performance and latency that could affect conversion. If you look at Page Speed, you will find that distance=latency=low conversion.

If you run AdSense, you should check what ads are displayed on your site. Access your site from different location to see the ads running on your webpages. The ads might be a factor deterring your visitors from converting.

Finally, you should keep an eye over your competitors. You should have complete information about what your competitors are doing. They might give you a great insight on offers and deals for geo targeting. This intelligence would help in making a winning design or narrating a popular story. You can use the information to modify your tests.

Conclusion 

The blog sheds light on advantages of Geo Targeting webpages and converting location specific traffic. It highlights an important point that is location could be more important than browser or screen resolution.

Ge-targeting is simple and beneficial to everyone – websites, advertisers and publishers. Whether you are running AdWords marketing or working on search marketing, geo-targeting is for you. It enables matching content with needs. Also, it allows experimenting with traffic to increase conversion.

For geo-targeting, you should use monitoring tools like global proxy tools and try understanding the market trends and behavior of targeted users. You need to be creative with the intelligence and insight into the business in order to achieve high conversion rate.