Geo Targeting and Campaign Performance

When online advertising first started in the mid-1990’s, there was little or no geo-targeting. For several years, advertisers simply bought media from publishers based in the country in which they wanted to advertise. Over the years, most advertisers and agencies have learned how to use fundamental geo-targeting on a national basis. However, we often see advertisers and agencies making huge mistakes, showing ads in the wrong countries. We have archived screen shots and details of many such geo-targeting errors.

While most agencies and advertisers now know how to do basic, national geo-targeting, few are adept at using geo-targeting on a more local basis, such as by state, province, or city. Ironically, many smaller, local businesses seem more knowledgeable about local geo-targeting than huge media agencies and international corporations. Many agencies and advertisers, lacking knowledge of how to run local campaigns, mistakenly run campaigns nationally in countries in which they would be better off running regional or local campaigns.

Geo-targeting mistakes are common, and waste advertisers a lot of money, for example:

  • A fast food company with shops only in Metro Manila is buying online media and showing their ads across the entire country. Their media agency should be geo-targeting their client’s ads only to the Metro Manila area, where their stores are based. Similarly, shopping malls in Metro Manila / Makati advertise sales events across the entire country, because they and their media agencies don’t know how to do local geo-targeting.

  • Airlines often waste much of their online media budgets using national targeting when, in fact, the catchment area for the airport(s) they serve in a country is just a small portion of the total country. Globalis Media has saved many airlines cumulatively millions of dollars by implementing intelligent local geo-targeting to replace the wasteful national targeting that other media agencies had used.

Globalis Media has run campaigns for advertisers targeting specific regions, prefectures, states, provinces and cities in dozens of countries. We have run local campaigns in US states, cities, and DMA’s, Canada’s provinces and territories, Australia’s states and territories, UK counties, Germany’s states, France’s departments, Japan’s prefectures, China’s provinces and major metro areas, India’s states, Korea’s provinces and major cities, and local areas in the Philippines, Thailand, Malaysia, etc.

Globalis Media achieves superior cost-performance for clients by fully leveraging the power of overlaying geo-targeting and language targeting. For example, in most Asian markets, we run clients’ ads in two languages: the country’s native language and English. This is especially effective for advertisers in industries that might develop lucrative business among non-native persons, e.g., travel, financial services, etc. We can target Japanese users worldwide, Koreans in the Philippines, English speakers in Beijing and Shanghai, foreigners in Thailand, Russians outside Russia, Polish people in the UK, etc.

Globalis Media’s expertise in precision geo-targeting gives our clients a huge competitive advantage and contributes to significant cost savings. Local geo-targeting is a “must” for many businesses, and makes online campaigns economically viable for businesses that aren’t national.