Hi all, A vendor contacted me to request advertising on my MyBB forum, however he is contractually obligated to only serve advertisements to those living in a certain region of the United States. Should I know of any MyBB plugins or other ways to serve this advertising? The vendor could go through Google, but then I would not receive a direct advertising fee. Please help!
Thanks for the quick reply. The vendor would prefer by zip code, but right now I'm trying to see what my options are. If the options are less granular, I might still be able to save the deal.
Zip code is going to be tough... the more detailed you get, the less accurate geotargetting is. To the city-level could be fairly accurate, but it's not super accurate. If you go here, you can see how well it knows where you are (as an example): https://tools.digitalpoint.com/geo We actually have an advertising system that works with MyBB, but the geotargetting is at the country-level currently (we will probably roll out region-level at some point, which would be targetting at the state-level). But city and specifically down to zip code within a city probably not any time soon. Do you have enough traffic from the zip code(s) they want to target to support the traffic they want? Just out of curiosity, what type of product/service are they advertising that they are just wanting people in a certain zip code?
Thanks for the detailed reply Shawn. The vendor is an automobile dealer in Manhattan. They wish to restrict traffic to the general New York area, and perhaps into some areas of New Jersey. At this point, I probably do not have much traffic from those areas, but the vendor knows that and will be priced accordingly. We are preparing for an influx in traffic over the next 6 months. The digitalpoint tool found my current location accurately in southwestern Virginia.
I think for something like that (where you want to really try to target at the city or county-level, you are probably going to end up needing to build a custom advertising platform for that (probably not what you wanted to hear, I know)... If it's just a one-time advertising deal, you could probably hard-code it without TOO much difficulty if your server supports geotargetting user's IP addresses to the city-level.
A custom ad platform is definitely not what I wanted to hear, but the suggestion of geotargeting intrigues me. As someone who does not know anything about geotargeting an ad, do you know of any helpful resources? Is there plug-and-play ad code out there that would help accomplish what I need? I'm not sure where to start, and I'm under a time crunch with this advertiser. I currently have a simple ad rotating plugin on the site now.
If your server's PHP installation has the GeoIP extensions compiled into it (and the associated databases installed), you could use this function to get the information about where the user is (based on their IP): http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.geoip-record-by-name.php From that info, you could then have some logic as to which ad to serve. If you have a PHP programmer you work with, I'd have them do it for you... it shouldn't be too difficult when it comes down to it.