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Does anyone know what this software is?

by rvrabel2002
9 replies
In media buying ads I have come across, when I click through to a link, the sales page i'm referred to is in blog format, where the "character" in the page just happens to be from the town I'm from.

I'm willing to bet that if i clicked on this link in say, dallas Texas, the character would be from Dallas, TX...

My question is, How do you do this? Seems like an advanced code or something that im not very good at.

If you need an example, just go to yahoo and look for ads that say "{your town} mom reveals teeth whitening trick", or something to that effect.

Some of the gurus on here are prob laughing at me right now, but I just cant figure out how this is done. Any ideas?
#software
  • Profile picture of the author RanD
    It might be part of the Visitor Maps Plugin or something similar.
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    • Profile picture of the author rvrabel2002
      Originally Posted by RanD View Post

      It might be part of the Visitor Maps Plugin or something similar.
      Eh, I don't think that's what it is...Its something like Aweber, or some of the other auto-responders use, like a field name or something.

      Example:

      Hi there, my names John, and I currently reside in [field ip:city, state]. I work in...yada yada yada, and so forth and so on....

      maybe there is another plugin, but i don't think that's the one...thanks for the help though
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      • Profile picture of the author JohnMcCabe
        What you are seeing is a script that looks up the location of the ISP using one of several IP look-up databases commercially available. Then the script plugs in the location when serving the ad or rendering the page.

        EDIT: I can't say anything about the ads that use it, but it's one of the footprints often used to identify splogs (spam blogs)... especially those that use that newspaper format.
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      • Profile picture of the author RanD
        Originally Posted by rvrabel2002 View Post

        Eh, I don't think that's what it is...Its something like Aweber, or some of the other auto-responders use, like a field name or something.

        Example:

        Hi there, my names John, and I currently reside in [field ip:city, state]. I work in...yada yada yada, and so forth and so on....

        maybe there is another plugin, but i don't think that's the one...thanks for the help though
        That plugin is not just the map, that is just part of it. If you look at the screen shots it shows city, state, and country information including the temperature in that city.

        As it says: "The visitor details include: what page the visitor is on, IP address, host lookup, online time, city, state, country, geolocation maps and more."

        Of course it may not be the exact one. Try doing a search for wordpress geolocation plugins.
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        • Profile picture of the author rvrabel2002
          Originally Posted by RanD View Post

          That plugin is not just the map, that is just part of it. If you look at the screen shots it shows city, state, and country information including the temperature in that city.

          As it says: "The visitor details include: what page the visitor is on, IP address, host lookup, online time, city, state, country, geolocation maps and more."

          Of course it may not be the exact one. Try doing a search for wordpress geolocation plugins.
          Stupid me didn't read the whole thing, sorry. Either way, i think its a little too complicated for me to implement, maybe ill just try things without it...thanks everyone for your answers!
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          • Profile picture of the author rvrabel2002
            Here is a quick example i just found...Mens Health 8

            Although I think the coding is wrong (It gave me the weather in Highland, Indiana) This is something i was looking into
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          • Profile picture of the author RanD
            Originally Posted by rvrabel2002 View Post

            Stupid me didn't read the whole thing, sorry. Either way, i think its a little too complicated for me to implement, maybe ill just try things without it...thanks everyone for your answers!
            I can't say for sure, but it looks like it's just a matter of installing the plugin and configuring th widgets for the information you want to show. There's a bunch of different ones out there.

            Wordpress Geolocation Plugins

            That link lists their descriptions and ratings. one of the ones listed has a 5 star rating and the description says: "Add, change, or remove content from your pages/posts based on your visitor's location: country, state, metro area, and even city. Easy & 100% free"


            You might want to check them out.
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  • Profile picture of the author Nigels
    I think what you're seeing is geo location from your IP address. Whenever you visit a website, that site gets to know your IP address (which it needs in order to send the web pages etc that you request back to you). Without descending into the technical ins and outs, your IP address is given to you by your ISP and is often, though not always, linked to your geographic location.

    That basically means that a website you visit can guess where the computer you are using to connect to the Internet is located. It's not a perfect system, but probably works well enough to serve geo personalized ads to a significant % of the visitors to a site.

    To test if that's whats happening, try visiting the site with the ads using a proxy which you know is based somewhere else and see which city the newspaper stories are based in then. You can use such techniques in your own sites, but I suspect you'd need to hire a coder to make it work. I don't know of any off the shelf software which can be deployed without programming ability.
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  • Profile picture of the author AceOfShirts
    I just went looking for an ad like that I couldn't find one. I can't believe it.

    A couple of months ago I had the same question you did. The way I figured it was I did a "view source" to see the page code. Near the top of the page I found the code that was calling to the geo-ip site to get the city name. I went to the home page of the site and there was information on how to add it to your pages. I think it was even free.

    Good Luck,

    Dennis Graves
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