Has your business been offered the opportunity to run “geo-targeted” social media ads by a small, local digital marketing firm?\u00a0 This is a simple enough concept in printed media, run an ad in a publication exclusive to Atlanta, GA and an audience in that area sees it.\u00a0 This is quite a bit different when it comes to social media and it’s track record for small businesses is abysmal.\u00a0 It’s a matter of those pushing the product, smaller social media digital marketing firms, not understanding the underlying technology and it’s limitations.<\/p>\n
Digital geo-marketing relies primarily on data collected by a couple of firms in attempts to obtain legitimacy.\u00a0 Maxmind and Digital Envoy TRY to collect geo-location data using ping responses.\u00a0 Ya, if you’re a network admin go ahead and laugh.\u00a0 Ping data.\u00a0 “Pinging” IP addresses is a technology older than the World Wide Web.\u00a0 It’s a command used to identify latency times between computers and network appliances.\u00a0 On wired and private networks these ping response times measuring latency are pretty reliable.\u00a0 On public networks and more specifically mobile networks ping latency is far less reliable when it comes to pinpointing IP address locations.\u00a0 It’s literally a guessing game, full of of too many assumptions to list.\u00a0 Even the geo-location companies admit it’s “a bit like solving a mystery”.<\/p>\n
Geo-location companies do not know with any precision where an ISP is delivering an address, certainly not with any accuracy down to 30km or less, just over 20 miles.\u00a0 Most often that level of accuracy cannot be achieved.\u00a0 So the smaller the area you want to target your advertising, the less likely it is any marketing will reach that designated audience.\u00a0 If you want to advertise in the entire state of GA exclusively, you might get the results you’re looking for.\u00a0 Maybe.\u00a0 Assuming none of the internet service providers re-address or redesign their network in a broad area.<\/p>\n
There are other limiting factors in using IPv4 internet addresses to try to identify audience locations.\u00a0 Many ISPs, especially those in Asia and Europe are switching to IPv6 public network addresses, abandoning IPv4 entirely, the address model used by these geo-data aggregation firms.\u00a0 Spectrum Communications is doing this in the US now.\u00a0 This is not information digital media marketing firms want you to know.\u00a0 The geo-targeted marketing they are trying to sell is an inaccurate science, relying on assumed information and technology that is becoming more irrelevant every day.<\/p>\n
All that said geo-targeted marketing is possible and is currently working for several large enterprise organizations.\u00a0 I say “enterprise” because I am referring to Google, Yahoo, Facebook and other organizations which have millions to spend on entire departments to make sense out of network addresses and their delivered locations using Ping Triangulation, a sophisticated and manual process.\u00a0 For example Google uses cars in every major metropolitan city in the world to triangulate and confirm IP addresses and subnets delivered by local ISPs to subscribers.\u00a0 They do not provide this collected information to third parties, not even for a price.\u00a0 Google will target your ad geographically for you at their rates.<\/p>\n
So unless your local digital media marketing firm has a few cars checking IP addresses on a daily basis in every market you may wish to advertise it’s likely they are working off bad and inaccurate data.\u00a0 Of course they won’t tell you this which is why my opinion is that most, but not all, digital marketing firms should be relegated to the same receptacle as the stale and now irrelevant firms still pushing search optimization, SEO, the trash bin.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Has your business been offered the opportunity to run “geo-targeted” social media ads by a small, local digital marketing firm?\u00a0 This is a simple enough concept in printed media, run an ad in a publication exclusive to Atlanta, GA and an audience in that area sees it.\u00a0 This is quite a bit different when it … Continue reading Why “Geo-targeted” social media advertising will not work for most small firms.<\/span>