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By Rob Friedman
Benefits of utilizing IP Intelligence to deliver online ads for small businesses include:
Increase click-through rates. By delivering relevant ads to an online audience, companies increase their click-through rates (while increasing ROI of online ads.) For example, if a company sells sports team merchandise - wouldn’t it be cool if when visitors from Atlanta are surfing the Internet they were presented with ads for gear from the Atlanta Braves or Falcons? By using IP Intelligence, click-through rates can be increased more than 30 percent over non-targeted messaging.
Target ads based on geography. Knowing the geographic region of Web visitors enables companies to provide relevant homepage ads, increasing the likelihood of a purchase. Wouldn’t it make more sense to show them relevant products that minimizes their search time and helps them make a quicker decision? For example, promote a sale on winter gear — parkas, snow boots and gloves — to someone visiting from the Northeast (in the winter), instead of presenting them with bathing suits.
Enhance couponing. A small retailer with only a few shops in Southern California wants to try its hand at online advertising. The ad campaign provides a coupon to visitors, giving them a percentage off an item from the store (if they print it out and bring it in.) Using IP Intelligence, the retailer can save money, increase the value of the media campaign, and boost response rates by delivering the coupon to people in just Southern California locales. This form of online advertising also increases offline promotions by driving traffic into retail locations.
Reduce random clicks. Geo-targeted ads save companies money by reducing ad clicks from non-valued audiences. Since geo-targeted ads are only presented to applicable Web visitors — for a particular promotion — companies reduce the number of wasted impressions, by not presenting ads to those visitors who aren’t a fit. Targeting an audience with the right message reduces waste and delivers more measurable results.
Serve media-rich online ads. The hot ad medium right now is streaming video. IP Intelligence allows companies to customize delivery of an ad based on the end user’s connection speed. Small business can now serve media-rich ads only to those users with high-speed connections.
In addition, small businesses who thought they couldn’t afford to place online advertising on large media networks (i.e. New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Businessweek, etc.) should investigate whether or not these publishers offer localized advertising. This type of customized offering makes online advertising more affordable and the reach more relevant for the small business.
Online advertising can be a vast, global medium, but IP Intelligence now allows small businesses to customize and localize this channel on their terms — providing the platform for smaller companies to compete on a much grander scale.
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