AdRotate Geo Explained – Increase your advertising campaigns relevancy with Geo Targeting.

geo-serviceSome people asked about what AdRotate Geo does, where they can download it and how it works. In this post I’ll try to answer all 3 questions.
In short AdRotate Geo is a Geo Lookup service. This means that it provides geo location data on your websites visitors where available.

What is AdRotate Geo

Quite simply put, AdRotate Geo is a Geo Lookup service for AdRotate Pro users. And what is a Geo Lookup service? It’s a service that tries to locate where your visitor is so you can target specific advertisements to that person. Targeting your visitors by their location has some great advantages. For example, what use is it to show adverts for a New York restaurant to a website visitor from Japan. None. So don’t waste your impressions on them. Use Geo Targeting to show that Japanese visitor something else. Something relevant. AdRotate Geo helps you with that.

Where to get or download AdRotate Geo

AdRotate Geo is not a downloadable product. You don’t have to buy it, either.
If you have AdRotate Pro version 3.12 or newer then AdRotate Geo is available to you. You can select the service in the Geo Targeting settings of AdRotate pro. All you need to use AdRotate Geo is a valid license that is registered. Basically that means activating the license ๐Ÿ™‚ Simple.

How does AdRotate Geo work

AdRotate Geo is composed of 3 parts really.

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  • The 1st part is built-in in AdRotate Pro and grabs the visitors IP address and makes the request to the AdRotate Geo Server. But also processes the reply of AdRotate Geo.
  • The 2nd part is on the AdRotate Geo server and receives your requests. After validating the request it also sends a reply to your website. Either a valid result you can use or a message why you can’t use AdRotate Geo.
  • The 3rd part is the actual Geo Location database inside AdRotate Geo. This database is provided by MaxMind and is updated regularly for accuracy.

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So how does that work.

When a visitor enters your site he or she may get to a page where an advert is placed with Geo Targeting enabled. At that point AdRotate Pro needs to determine where that visitor is in the world and show an advert or not. If this information is not known by a earlier placed cookie, a request is sent to AdRotate Geo with the IP address of that visitor. AdRotate Geo checks if your site is known in the database and if it is looks up the IP address of the visitor. If the IP address is known AdRotate Geo sends back a reply with the location of that person. This can be a Country, City and/or State. Or any sensible combination of the 3. Most developed areas are listed and known.
Once AdRotate Pro gets a valid response from AdRotate Geo with location data it selects the advert to show to the visitor.
This happens in a matter of milliseconds and won’t impact your sites performance beyond that.

To make this even faster, once the visitor has visited your site, a cookie is created on the visitors computer containing the geo data retrieved from AdRotate Geo. This means that if that visitor comes back to your site before the cookie expires NO request to AdRotate Geo is required. AdRotate Pro will use the cookie of that person.

Signing up for AdRotate Geo

This is as simple as activating the option with a valid license for AdRotate Pro. If your site is not known to AdRotate Geo it will validate the first request and register your site automatically. You won’t even notice this. After 2 weeks of inactivity your site is automatically removed from the database. If you then start using AdRotate Geo again the signup process is simply repeated.

Paid options

AdRotate Geo in it’s basic form is free. You can make 14400 requests (Lookups) per day for free. For most small to medium websites this is plenty.
Since every visitor uses 1 or 2 request per day at the default settings, this means you can serve many visitors per day and you don’t have to pay a dime for it.
If you need more lookups you can buy them via the AdRotate Geo page. These will be added to your total quota. Lookups are a dirt cheap commodity and I think that everyone should be able to benefit from Geo Targeting. it makes your advertising campaigns so much more valuable.

AdRotate 3.12.2

It took a while to figure out but with some help from Austria we managed to get the cities/state filter working a bit more accurately.

In some configurations the states were not filtered out correctly. For others it didn’t always work for cities. This happened because of a function treating the array to check differently than it should. This has now been improved.

On top of that, services not reporting a Geo Lookup quota are now excluded from the quota notifications.

Changes

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  • [fix] No longer apply geo lookup quota for services that don’t report a quota
  • [tweak] Better filter logic for geo cities/states

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Updates

Updates are available through your dashboard if you use version 3.12 or newer.
You can download updates manually from your account on this website if you do not yet have version 3.12.

Licenses

If your license starts with 101 (all licenses bought trough the now defunct www.adrotateplugin.com) you may need to register a new account on this website (top right corner) and link your license to that account from your profile.

Note: The title should of-course be ‘AdRotate Pro 3.12.2’.

Failing SSL for AdRotate and technical shizzlewizzle

ssl-imageAs some of you know I’ve secured my sites with SSL (HTTPS). Recently when moving adrotateplugin.com over to this website I also moved over all related services such as the updates API.

Today it turns out that WordPress in all it’s wisdom decides to not validate my SSL certificate for ajdg.solutions but the one for adrotateplugin.com. Which of-course fails because the domain is not matching with the request.
This means; broken updates for everyone…

Disabling SSL seems to be the only sane workaround for this. Updates work if you have AdRotate Pro 3.12. But everyone else who didn’t update yet still relied on the update api on adrotateplugin.com which now doesn’t work anymore. Yep ๐Ÿ™

Because of technical limitations on how most browsers treat such things adrotateplugin.com is now offline. Sticking with http seems of little use since everyone uses https.
I took the site offline and will be redirecting it to the new page on this website.

If you have a license key that starts with 101 and you can’t update Get in touch. Please mention your license key and email address so I can set you up quickly!

I will be developing a easier and self-help solution for this over the weekend or next week. But this kinda hit me in the face and I’m working hard to make this a workable situation soon-ish. Bah…

AdRotate Pro 3.12.1 – Refinements

logo-512x512After an otherwise well received update here are some refinements to make it even better.
You’ve probably noticed some Geo Targeting alerts ๐Ÿ™ … Yea, fixed.

Some other tweaks/fixes are included as well.

Changes

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  • [fix] Metro/DMA Codes not properly stored for some Geo Services
  • [fix] Geo Targeting Quota messages being sent unnecessarily
  • [fix] Cookie expiry setting now shows the right value

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AdRotate Geo – extra lookups now available

geo-serviceAdRotate Geo is the exclusive Geo lookup service for AdRotate Pro users. The pre-paid lookups are now available for purchase. I’ve decided to make this crazy cheap so it’s in reach for everyone.

Originally the prices were going to be โ‚ฌ20, โ‚ฌ80 and โ‚ฌ160 euros for 100.000, 500.000 and 1.000.000 lookups respectively. The price is now set at โ‚ฌ10, โ‚ฌ50 and โ‚ฌ100 euros.
Check out the page here; AdRotate Geo product page.

Do you need Geo Targeting

If you have your ads targeted at specific areas, sure. It’s most useful where you can run localised campaigns. Your advertiser may require it for their campaign. After-all, if you have a restaurant in New York, it makes no sense to advertise in Japan or even Philadelphia… So make the most of your advertising campaigns and use geo targeting.

Geo Services

AdRotate Pro supports several lookup services such as MaxMind’s GeoIP2 and the GeoBytes IpLocator.
Both services are very affordable but still not everyone can afford it. Some simply forget to include it in the advertiser pricing, others simply have cheap adspace. Regardless of that, AdRotate Geo plays right into the market of medium sized sites that need affordable geo lookups.

Accuracy

How does AdRotate Geo compare to other services? AdRotate Geo uses Maxmind’s GeoLite2 database. This is fairly accurate and most countries can be detected without a problem. Cities are not always listed but most developed areas are supported just fine. Maxmind themselves rate the database as 90% accurate.

Try for free

AdRotate Geo’s basic subscription is free. It’s built right into your dashboard starting with AdRotate Pro 3.12 (released earlier this week) and all you have to do is activate it. If you don’t pay for extra lookups you get 14400 lookups for free, every day. For most small sites that will be plenty. For larger sites, well – Buy more ๐Ÿ™‚ You know you can afford it.