Who sees your adverts? Location specific web advertising.

Nowadays, it is very common for part of the content of a web site to have been created and published by someone other than the owner web site. For example, the content of many question and answer fora is almost exclusively created by the users themselves.

The volume of comments on the most popular newspapers and blogs will easily outstrip the word count of the original article written by the paid journalist. Any site owner can add continually updating streams of photographs and news to which others freely contribute and which appear on our Web sites automatically.

And then of course, there is online advertising. Placement of advertising used to be a very controlled. But since any web site owner can now publish adverts irrespective of the amount of readers they have, the number of sites carrying adverts has mushroomed. Now that anyone can carry ads, the whole process has been largely automated.

Most web site owners do not explicitly select their advertisers. Instead, adverts are automatically selected on their behalf based on the their site’s content and a dose of clever technology such as geo-location. This is called contextual advertising. Social networking sites such as Facebook are able to use an even greater number of factors when delivering ads to their readers. As a registered user, social networking sites generally know your age, gender and a range of your interests.

How Contextually Relevant Advertising Works

We’ve all seen the small text adverts and banner ads that lots of web sites (including this one) have. But if you’re not involved in publishing on the web, you may not have realised that the owner of the Web site usually has not chosen that ads that you see. In fact the next visitor will probably see an entirely different set of ads and the site owner probably has no idea what ads are being served up on their site. How can they be expected to, the ads vary all the time.

Advertising programmes such as Google AdSense and Yahoo Ads are so successful with small publishers because there is next to no management of the adverts required.

Adverts are included each time a reader views a page on your Web site and the ads that are displayed depends on the context. The thing is, there is single context, there are many. So advertising is placed on a site based on the following factors:

What is the page about? – This is determined by the written content of the page. By implication, it is also based on the language that the content is written in, but as we’ll see that doesn’t mean that the language of the adverts will match the language of the content.

The reader’s own language - This can be detected from the reader’s browser, though is an unreliable metric in my experience as it it often just set to American English even for non-English speakers. It may also be the case that the computer or device being used to read the site isn’t necessarily owned by the reader and therefore the browser not set to their mother tongue or in some international companies it may just be the policy to set up all browsers with a specific profile irrespective of the different languages used by their staff.

The reader’s location - This is known as geo-location and is a method of figuring out where on Earth you are at that precise moment, or more accurately, where the advertiser thinks you are. Again, not always accurate for a number of reasons and variable from country to country, but on the whole this does help deliver geographically relevant adverts and by extension, adverts in one of the common languages of the country the reader is currently in. Again, though workers in international companies or institutions may be incorrectly identified as being in a different country if they are connecting via their companies servers or using VPN.

I’ve seen a Belgium based, British employee of an American company based in London identified as being in London because she was connected via VPN, but identified as being in Belgium when not working on VPN.

Similarly another Belgium based employee who works for a company that has a parent company in the Netherlands shows up as being in the Netherlands when connected via his company infrastructure, but Belgium when at home.

It’s also very common for workers in the Europeans institutions in Brussels to show up as being located in Luxembourg, presumably because the EU has some IT infrastructure in Luxembourg.

So geo-location is a good solution for helping the advertising broker to work out which country specific and language specific ads to serve up to a reader, but it’s not totally clear cut and we sometimes have to take the results with a pinch of salt.

Here’s an example of geo-location in action. The screen shot below is of part of a page from the website wefunction.com. This is a company based in the Midlands of the UK and that host their site in the USA. The screenshot is taken from a computer in Belgium. In the right hand colum we see adverts which have been served up by Google. Google have correctly identified the page as being about web design and served up relevant ads. But they have also detected that I am in Belgium and tailored those ads further by showing ads from some Belgium and Netherlands based companies. Adverts 1,3 and 5 are in Dutch and we can see .be (Belgium), .nl (Netherlands) and .co.uk (UK) domain names used as links in the adverts.

If I were in France, China or the USA I would probably see different ads and ads specifically for companies in my region.

Other factors which determine an ad’s placement are:

Day of the week and time of day – This is usually determined by the advertisers themselves. The most popular online advertising systems such as AdSense enable advert publishers to display ads during predefined time periods. But what time is it where your reader is and how does that affect relevance?

Availability of ads - This is a simple market force. Most advertising systems let advertisers set a daily budget and a maximum price that they are willing to pay for a click-through. Based on historical data, the advertising broker is able to figure out how many times your adverts are likely to be displayed in a day. It then looks at how much you are willing to spend in a day and how much your are willing to pay for a click. It then knows how often it can display your advertisement on Website, spreading them throughout the day and keeping you within you budget.

So every time a page is viewed, all of these factors are reassessed and new adverts served. So the context of contextually relevant ads is constantly shifting.

This means all web site owners that carry contextual ads, whether they realise it or not, are publishing in a multi-lingual environment.