How to use IP address data for better PPC geotargeting

We continue the series of interesting blog posts written by industry experts, including marketers, analysts, developers and other professionals.

One of the most commonly used advertising strategies by online businesses is pay-per-click ads (PPC). These ads enable businesses to pay for ads only when someone clicks on the link from a search engine. These ads also work with social media platforms.

They are most useful for businesses that offer business-to-consumer (B2C) products or services, such as these:

• Online retail stores
• Hotel booking platforms
• Digital banking solutions
• Airline services
• Restaurants
• Adtech companies
• Account-based marketing

For instance, here’s an example of how this is used in the restaurant industry. Customers may search for “restaurants near me”. A PPC ad can help place your restaurant higher in the search engine rankings, meaning customers with high intent to purchase are more likely to see it before seeing other businesses not running PPC ads.

As many of IPinfo’s Adtech customers already know, to make PPC ads even more effective, companies (like those listed above) can use a technique called geotargeting.

What Is Geotargeting?

Geotargeting allows businesses to customize ads and other content based on the location of customers. And while it’s used for really effective advertising, geotargeting is also a valuable way to personalize web content such as CTAs, images, discounts, language preferences, and much more. Essentially, without IP address data, businesses wouldn’t be able to geotarget their customers.

How does IP address data improve targeted PPC ads?

IP address data reveals geolocation information for individuals while also protecting their privacy. Here are some of the insights IP addresses indicate:

• Country
• City
• State
• Region
• Postal code
• Nearest city center coordinates

With this information, businesses can target areas with a high audience density. This can range from whole countries to small areas.

This is an effective way of improving your advertising ROI as it limits your audience to consumers who are likely to use your product or service.

All this to say, IP addresses are the backbone to pinpointed PPC campaigns.

Why Should You Use Geotargeting?

Now more than ever before, customers expect personalization. This applies to PPC campaigns just as much as it does to website appearance.  

Additionally, geotargeting is extremely useful for businesses that rely on foot traffic for their income. Take, for instance, an online retail store in the US that also has a physical location. Imagine if this company ran a PPC ad in Portland. This ad is really only useful and practical for people in Portland looking for retail stores near them.

Geotargeting helps companies such as these to limit this PPC ad so that it doesn’t reach customers in Rio de Janeiro - customers who probably will never visit the in-person store. To eliminate this issue, companies can show these ads to people in pre-selected areas. This means that, when you pay for a link click, that click is optimized to lead to a sale.

How to pinpoint your PPC campaigns

The following tips will help you to maximize the impact of your pay-per-click campaign by using a geotargeting strategy.

Know Your Target Audience

As with all communication, it’s important to start with the audience. In order for a pay-per-click campaign to be cost-effective, it’s important to be making sales on a proportion of site visits. Geotargeting cuts down on irrelevant site clicks that will cost your business money but won’t generate any qualified leads. To do this, you need to understand your target audience.

Let’s take the example of an ecommerce site that wants to purchase POS software to help them with their sales. Here are some questions you might want to ask:

• What do our typical customers value? Efficiency? Better workflow?
• What do our buyers think is the solution to their problem?
• Where do they go to find information?
• What questions will our ideal customer type into a search engine?

In other words, some clients may be unaware that they need certain services or software, so you need to be able to use geotargeting to reach these buyers.  

This is why you need to understand what questions your target audience has about the industry. You can then gear your PPC campaigns to address these questions.

Use In-house Data to Retarget Customers

Especially for Account-Based Marketing, PPC ads need to be precise. But this also applies to B2C companies as well. Here are some important steps for using PPC to retarget your website visitors:

Firmographics

Using reverse IP lookups, IP to Company data, or domain names, businesses can gather insights to fuel customized PPC campaigns. In other words, you can use the IP addresses that visit your site to reveal more information about your customers. Then businesses can use this data to pinpoint B2B customers with the right messaging.

Integrate CRM data

Additionally, companies can use their CRM data to improve PPC campaigns. Consider an online retailer, for instance. Using a CRM that integrates with marketing platforms, they can use order history, customer demographics, and much more to pinpoint a geotargeted PPC campaign.

Follow PPC Insights

Have any past PPC campaigns revealed unique geographic insights? Do your campaigns tend to get more attention from customers in, say, Ireland than they do in China? This information can help you use geotargeting more effectively.

Keywords

Keywords are essential to any pay-per-click campaign, and here’s why: they make sure that the clicks that you receive are from relevant clients or customers.

With geotargeting, you want to make sure that the keywords associated with your business are also associated with location words. For example, if you run an inventory management business targeting clients in New York, the location is as important a keyword as your services.

The reason for this is simple: if clients are searching “perpetual inventory Montana”, then you may not be able to help them, despite having a relevant product. If they click on your link, this is an expense for your business that isn’t going to provide good ROI.

In short, you also need to be specific with your keywords.

For example, you might provide a VoIP business phone service. Businesses can use this for all sorts of communication needs over the internet, bypassing the need for a lot of expensive hardware. A potential client searching for a solution like this may be searching for a local business.

However, they may not be.

In this situation, consider researching where the majority of businesses that use these solutions are located. Targeting ads to these areas increases the likelihood of a relevant click, potentially from hundreds of miles away.

The same principle applies to using industry-specific keywords on your site. A blog with answers to current questions in your industry (for example, what is IVR or what is retail merchandising?) will help to boost your site’s ranking with keywords. But if you are not based in a technological center, you might want to think about targeting ads for these posts to areas where technology is a major industry.

Where Does Your Traffic Come From?

Geotargeting pay-per-click adverts is about driving more traffic to your site. But, to get the most out of your strategy, you need to know where your existing traffic is coming from.

Is it a search engine? If your site is already well-established, it’s likely that a lot of your traffic comes from search engines. Naturally, you want to drive more people to your site using location targeting and pay-per-click ads, but if the majority of your traffic comes from elsewhere, then you may want to consider using geotargeting on another platform.

Does the majority of traffic originate from social media? Search engines aren’t the only place that you can target your customers by location. Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter all have ad features that will let you choose who to target based on location, as well as interests, education level, age, and gender. Social media marketing is a popular choice for startups.

Is it your mailing list? Trends in email marketing indicate that email marketing has one of the highest ROIs of any marketing technique.

With that in mind, you may be able to combine geotargeting your ads with email marketing. You might want to try using location-targeted ads to direct potential customers to a page that allows signups to your mailing list.

So, how do you monitor the sources of your traffic?

A trend towards RPA uses in advertising might also prove valuable for your business. If you have the resources, you might want to create a program that will automatically monitor where your traffic comes from. This will save you time in the long run and make implementing geotargeted ads a lot easier.

As well as knowing which platform your customers use to come to your site, make sure to also use analytics software for search engines and social media to see where your clients come from geographically. Not only does this help with marketing, it’s also a great way to discover which products are trending where - which you can use to optimize your stock control system.

What’s Next?

Learning how to get started with geotargeting is your first step towards being able to implement it into your business practices.

Make sure to consider what exactly that you want to get out of your PPC campaign and how targeting specific areas offer an advantage over non-specific ads.

Each business will have different location requirements for its ads. When creating a pay-per-click strategy, be sure to find out where your customers are and what they need out of you as a business in terms of your location.

Discover more ways to use IP address data for pinpointed advertising! Connect with a data expert today!

This blog post is written by Nick Shaw from Brightpearl. Nick Shaw has been Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) of Brightpearl, the number one retail-focused digital operations platform which encompasses  sales and inventory management software, accounting, logistics, CRM and more, since July 2019 and is responsible for EMEA Sales, Global Marketing and Alliances. Nick has written for sites such as Hubspot and G2. Here is Nick Shaw’s LinkedIn.