phpadsnew & Geotargeting

Can anyone give me some pointers on the easy way to access the country data of my users in php?

I am running the phpadsnew & maxmind DB at the minute but I would like to be able to access the country data directly from a php script rather than via phpadsnew. The manual says I can set a cookie but I can't figure out what the cookie is doing.

Edit: using this, any better ideas?

	if (isset($_COOKIE["geo"])) {
    $country = $_COOKIE['geo'];
    } 
    else 
    {
    include("geoip.inc");
    $gi = geoip_open("GeoIP.dat",GEOIP_STANDARD);
    $country = geoip_country_code_by_addr($gi, $REMOTE_ADDR);
    geoip_close($gi);
    setcookie("geo", $country, time()+432000, "/", ".mad4mobilephones.com", 0); 
    }

Code (markup):

 

Maxmind should have an API that can do that for you.

 

I've got it working using the code above. Just seems that I am querying twice for each user. Once for phpadsnew and once for my script. Would be better if I could access whatever cookie phpadsnew is setting from my php script.