WP Engine Launches GeoIP for Location-Specific Marketing
WP Engine, provider of a Web content management and hosting platform for Web sites built on WordPress, has released WP Engine GeoIP, a new feature that allows marketers to target marketing content to Web site visitors based on their physical locations.
GeoIP enables brands to take a geomarketing approach to foster a more relevant, targeted, and personalized user experience tailored to each site visitor's country, state, city, and even ZIP code.
Every Internet-connected device has a unique IP address, and when a consumer visits a Web site that is equipped with GeoIP, the application takes that address and passes it back to the site owner, who can then send targeted messages or push notifications to the consumer, explains Tomás Puig, director of WP Engine Labs.
The whole process is done on the same servers that are used to host the Web site without having to worry about page caches, client-side implementations, or third-party Web services.
GeoIP fully supports EverCache, WP Engine's proprietary WordPress architecture.
"Jumping to other servers and services for the IP detection slows down site performance and makes a site load slower," Puig says. "And when the site is slow, that degrades the user experience considerably."
With GeoIP, "everything is super-fast," Puig says.
WordPress is in use on more than 60 million Web sites around the world. Of those, WP Engine has more than 26,000 customers and powers more than 250,000 sites.
With GeoIP, those Web site owners can filter merchandise or services that are specific to certain locales for a more localized marketing approach. This improves marketers' abilities to serve geographically relevant content or ads to visitors in different locations.
"Studies have shown that when you have localized content that is keyed in to users, conversions go up," Puig says.
While marketing is an obvious use case, Puig says there are others. For one, companies operating in other countries can use the system to display legal disclaimers required by law to site visitors from those countries.
"With GeoIP, any site can be localized very quickly," he states.
Retailers can benefit from GeoIP, but the same can be said of business referral services, professional services firms, lead generation businesses, and content aggregators, among others.
Blue Ant Media, a Canadian media company, was a GeoIP beta tester.
"GeoIP has allowed us to serve up much more relevant advertisements to our visitors based on what is going on around them at that specific point in time, greatly improving the effectiveness of our campaigns," said Matthew Hogg, development lead at Blue Ant Media, in a statement. "As soon as we installed the plugin, we gained immediate access to country, region, and city data for any visitor on any page of our site."
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