Use of Geo-Targeting

For most sites, visitors do not only come from a single country. When you check your website statistics you will find that you will attract visitors from other countries. So for example a website built to attract mainly UK visitors could also get visitors from Europe and even the USA and Canada.

You will of course have used a UK affiliate link to target your main visitors. But what if you want to also have an appropriate affiliate link, for visitors outside your main country of origin?

Geo-targeting is a method, that matches visitors to their country of origin and includes the correct affiliate link.

The most important information at a glance

• If you have site visitors from different countries, then Geo-tracking should be used.
• With affiliate marketing this is a very good way to increase the commission revenue

Understanding Geo-targeting?

Geo-targeting is basically about finding out where a website visitor comes from. This usually is represented as the country of origin most commonly. In some cases you can get more accurate evaluations by regions and cities if possible.

In the case of the Amazon Affiliate program, it is sufficient to know the country of origin to display the matching Affiliate Links.

Often, it can even make sense to display richer content depending on the country. So it could be that in a country in which a particular product does not exist, there is a similar product.

Example:

The Amazon affiliate program has its own branches for different countries (eg Germany, France, Great Britain and the USA). If one runs a website using the English language, many of the visitors will probably come from the UK and the US.

However there will also be many visitors from Germany, France and other countries. Different affiliate links are required for each country so you do not get very far with a UK Amazon affiliate link for a German visitor.

Automatic adjustment

So if you are using a content management system like WordPress, then it is advised to find plugins that automatically discover the country origin of the visitor and then match the Amazon affiliate links accordingly.

Additionally, services that specialize in geo-targeting affiliate links will often offer javascript snippets or provide specialized short links that are ideal for recommending different product recommendations for each country.

There are a few of these services available such as:

The Amazon Link Engine WordPress Plugin for Amazon affiliate links, will automatically adjust the affiliate link, depending on the country while. A plugin called Easyazon offers geo-targeting plus other features.

Third party intelligent link management service Geniuslink offers multiple tools to geo-target Amazon links including short links. SkimLinks is another alternative to make your Amazon links work for an international audience.

For a more general geo-targeting use, the plugin GeoTargeting Lite – WordPress GeoTargeting can be helpful.

What’s the point?

It is important of course that you sign up for all of the Amazon Affiliate programs for each country that you get visitors from. So for example if you have a UK website that attracts French visitors, then you need to be registered on Amazon as a French Affiliate.

By using a plugin to do the geo-targeting, you can then display an appropriate affiliate link, depending on the origin of visitors and earn more in this way. But that only makes sense to make the effort when your own website really has many visitors from other countries.