What is Geotargeting?

Geotargeting is an advertising and marketing term that describes determining the location of a website visitor in order to serve them personalized ads and increase conversion.

Geotargeting is especially useful for advertising, as advertisers can choose how to approach customers by increasing the relevancy of their offer according to the audience’s geographic region.

Geotargeting can be done with city or zip codes, IP addresses, device IDs, GPS signals and other methods. The methods most commonly used in online advertising today include IP addresses and device IDs. It’s often used to include the locale in offers, meaning that people living in Chicago would not be seeing offers from New York if they searched for “restaurants near me.”

The appeal of Geotargeting for advertisers lies in presenting the right message at the right time, which is why it is used for more than just determining where visitors live. For example, a customer in vicinity of a fast food chain is likely to be hungry, which is a good opportunity for a different restaurant to serve their ad at that exact moment.

In addition to real-time interests, Geotargeting also allows advertisers to understand a potential customer’s behavior by analyzing intent through locations the customer has previously visited.