Geotargeting for ecommerce sites

Geotargeting is central to a recent wave of developments in ecommerce all aimed at creating a more personal customer experience.

As ecommerce develops, sites are looking to re-create some of the positive experiences of shopping in physical stores, online. When people are shopping offline, they are often presented with an experience which is relevant to their location through the marketing, the offers, even the products suggested for them.

Personalisation is one of the methods which online shops are adopting to give shoppers that more targeted experience and geotargeting is one of the techniques to do so.

You can gear your entire site to target a specific country by using a geographic domain name such as .co.uk. If you don’t have one of these you can ask Google to target your site towards a country by using Webmaster Tools. However, rather than trying to exclude visitors from countries in this way, you can simply find out where the visitors you do have are coming from through IP address targeting.

“Geolocation by IP address is the technique of determining a visitor to your website’s geographic location by comparing the user’s public internet IP address with known locations of other electronically neighboring servers and routers. With this intelligence at your fingertips you can do all kind of cool things,” says Guy Mucklow, CEO, Postcode Anywhere.

There are a number of software companies which offer the technology you need to perform this kind of geotargeting. Using an IP address to determine where a customer is coming from doesn’t require your shoppers to give you any extra details and is often seen as a more subtle approach to personalisation.

“Unlike other, invasive techniques, IP geolocation data is not derived from user interactions or cookies, but instead relies on Internet infrastructure analysis,” says Kate Owen, Managing Director, Europe, Digital Element.

“Businesses can therefore build more engaging and meaningful interactions with potential eCommerce customers without them having to share any data about themselves. That’s both personalised and polite.”

So what can you do with this information to boost sales and improve customer engagement?

Currency and language

On the most basic level, knowing where your customer is coming from allows you to present the website in the correct language and in the correct currency. Not being able to provide this for shoppers will turn them off immediately so it’s important to get it right.

“Being able to pick the correct language is essential especially in Europe, there is a huge drop-off on the front page of a site if it is not in the language of the buyer, even if there is a switcher button to change language,” says Rupert Young, VP Product Management, Neustar.

Auto-fill forms

By knowing some of the location details of your shoppers you can autofill some of the fields for them. Facing a long registration form can put people off going through with sales so helping them along the way is a good plan. Always give them an option to change these details however in case they are wrong.

Shipping estimations

“Shipping and tax estimators can also benefit from the data, allowing you to automatically present estimated charges,” says Mucklow.

Location-based offers

When it comes to offers and discounts, they can sometimes be geographically dependent so knowing where shoppers are coming from can make sure you only show the offers to the right people.

Make recommendations

The best way of getting shoppers to buy from you os to show them products you think they’ll want to buy. There might be products or services in your inventory that are best suited to certain geographical areas so how these off. Recommended products are a also tried and tested method of getting extra sales, why not recommend in relation to location?

“Present visitors with customized content on the fly, based on their geographic location, such as presenting the ‘hottest’ selling items in their region,” says Owen.

Target your advertising

The more relevant an advert is the more chance there is of someone clicking on it. Using IP targeting you can make sure your ads reach the right people.

Fight fraud

Online crime is estimated to be costing etailers over £205m each year. Knowing where your customers are coming from can help you to battle this and prevent it happening to you.

“Geolocation technology can identify the user’s location, which can identify locations where the probability of fraud is the highest,” says Mucklow.

“It can also compare the location of the shopper’s address to their provided credit card billing address, allowing you to flag up any discrepancies between the two. Merchants can then apply additional authentication measures or identification for those transactions. In the same way, it allows you to filter countries that you do not want to do business with.”

Boost offline sales

If you are a business with both internet and brick-and-mortar stores, your online store can help draw people to your offline shop. You can create offers or give coupons to be used in certain stores. You can also let them know where their nearest store is without them having to use a store locator.

Are there any downsides to geo-targeting?

There is a certain margin of error when it comes to IP targeting. The location isn’t always correct. This is something to keep in mind when considering using this kind of technology.

“The limitation is that it’s normally only going to be accurate to “town” level, and a certain proportion of visitors will get entirely the wrong address now and then,” says Malcolm Duckett, CEO of Magiq.

“This is particularly true in the case of visitors using corporate networks, where often their location will be reported as the head office location no matter where the actual user is located.”