Monetizing global traffic

Doing AdSense with affiliate marketing

[kmander]

AdSense provides a fantastic means of monetizing your sites traffic from the around the world. By dynamically targeting ads to each visitors country, your open to earn from every visitor coming to your site.

With content rich sites your bound to receive global traffic, while even heavily country specific sites, such as those aimed for a UK audience will likely see a significant proportion of visitors originating from elsewhere. Attempting to reap rewards from these visitors is where lies a challenge for webmasters.

I am curious to know your thoughts on how you can achieve similar scalability through affiliate marketing or if you have any suggestions of how you would like to see this progress in the future.

The Amazon and eBay programs are superb for webmasters as they are so diverse it's possible to include them on pages relating to almost any topic imaginable. However, they don't cope with the reality of global traffic in that you need to pick whether to showcase products in pounds or dollars, or include links to the .co.uk or .com domain names. Send the user to the wrong one and you will never achieve the conversion.

I would love to know if anyone has got around this with any cunning or creative means. Including links to multiple sites, with pictures of flags is certainly something that I have seen. Anyone have any other methods? I am dying to see a working model of a site that dynamically investigates the users geography (via IP) and then shows just what is relevant for them. If anyone could PM me a link that would be superb.

Sorry for such a long winded post, I hope that others may find this a stimulating area for discussion.

[kmander]

No takers? I don't want to have to talk to myself :(

[wrgvt]

On my sites, my product pages serve links for the different international amazons. With a link and a "Buy" button for each country, I don't have to identify where my visitors are coming from but instead give them the option of choosing which amazon site they want to visit. With AWS (or ECS), I can also display the price at the different amazons in the local currency.

[kmander]

Many thanks for your insight wrgvt.

Would you say that there have been clear benefits to adopting this strategy (flags to Amazon countries)?

Can you see value if there was an easy way to intergrate the ability to identify the users geography and dynamically display the relevant link/price/currency?

What is the AWS/ECS solution that you talk of?

[wrgvt]

The clear benefits is that I sell amazon products in multiple countries with each page without having to do anything special for geo-targetting or dealing with IP ranges or possible proxies or anything else of that nature. Also, someone in Canada might decide the price or availability is better from the US and order from amazon.com instead of amazon.ca. Someone in the US in a hurry to get a book already available in the UK but not in the US can order that book from amazon.co.uk instead of amazon.com. My approach has been to give my site's visitors control over what they see and where they order from instead of trying to figure it out for them.

AWS and ECS are datafeeds from amazon where you can extract just about any information for any amazon product and incorporate it into your web site. I only use it for pricing information.

[uknewbie]

One of my sites has a global audience so I've started to resolve visitors IP's to countries. My site is based around a certain category of electronic widget.

If the IP of a visitor can be resolved then I store the result in a cookie so that every time they visit the site again the process doesn't have to repeated.

For each of the products mentioned on the site I found international merchants who offer them and signed up. A link to each product for each merchant is stored in a database along with the price (as a plain decimal - no currency sign) and the country the merchant represents.

Whenever a visitor views the site all of the affiliate links and pricing information changes to suit the visitors location, and if the IP cannot be resolved then it defaults to the USA (my biggest market).

You normally have to pay for an IP>Location service but I use a free implementation. It has around 95% accuracy.

[kmander]

Wow, I am impressed uknewbie. You really hit the nail on the head in terms of what I had in mind for what is a technical solution.

Would you be impressed if a merchant were to provide creatives with this kind of functionality embedded. In the style of AdSense, I would like to see eBay or Amazon banners/buttons/editors kit link to the appropiate country site automatically.

[uknewbie]

It would be great if Amazon could implement something just like you describe.

There are alot of webpages out there that are just static HTML and that have links in the content to Amazon.com. A sizable percentage of the people who click that link will not live in the USA and will not continue to purchase the item for that sole reason (shipping, tax, etc), so why not automatically forward them to their own countries Amazon store that they will be more likely to purchase from? Amazon could increase their sales alot.

Of course, some of the items available in one Amazon store are not available in another, but I am sure they could find a way around this.

[kmander]

Thanks for sharing your thoughts uknewbie. Has anyone got anything to share with regards to the eBay affiliate program?

[waverider]

To determin the visitor's country by IP you could use geoipfree.
I see it's used by AwStats.
It's probably an Open Source project, but couldb't find its home site in google.

A side note on your initial question. I think this is one of those "little" things than can seriously increase your revenues from AM.

There might be a lot of people, from UK, for instance, then click on Amazon.com book copy it's title and paste it in the search field of Amazon.co.uk. And there goes your commission.

[kmander]

Seems to work well enough for Google, so I am sure the success rate must be pretty impressive.

[kmander]

I am wanting to take this to the next step. Anyone have any hands on experience with geoipfree or similar solution?

I want to start off with a simple example building excercise. If a UK user comes to my page, they see a UK flag, US = US flag.

[uknewbie]

Hi kmander,

I can tell you how I implemented it but it is a little technical. You need to be familiar with a web programming language and have some knowledge of databases too.

Basically the process involves:

1.Downloading a text file containing a list of IP ranges and their related geographical locations.
2.Import this data into a suitable database (MySQL, MSSQL or at a push Microsoft Access).
3.Write the code for your webpages that will be run when a visitor accesses the page. This code needs to retrieve the users IP address, looks up the relevant data in the database and then return a 2 digit country code.
4.Modify your website depending on this 2 digit country code. For your example if the result was "US" then a US flag graphic would be output to the visitor, or if the result was "UK" or "GB" then the UK flag would be output.

I use ASP.NET for all of my website coding so I will only be able to give you code samples in this language if you require them.

The IP database textfile (and user guide/examples in PHP) can be downloaded from [ip-to-country.webhosting.info...]