Going Local: How MaxMind Helps GeoFli’s Customers’ Conversion Rates Soar
Digitally savvy consumers are increasingly seeking online experiences tailored to their interests; meanwhile, web personalization companies like GeoFli are increasingly seeking ways to deliver just the right experiences to those consumers, at the right time.
“We wanted to create a service to display website content based on a visitor’s IP address,” said GeoFli co-founder Nick Shontz. “Using MaxMind’s GeoIP2 City database combined with GeoFli’s custom software, we have seen conversion rates double for our customers. It’s great having an industry-leading tool like GeoIP2 City that’s so easy to integrate with our systems and have such great application and scalability,” Shontz added.
As co-founder Kyle Pucko explains: “One customer, an app developer, measured their conversions by counting the number of downloads. Before using our solution, their conversion rate was less than 3% historically. Using GeoFli, the customers conversion rate rose to around 7% in just 30 days.” Another customer, UPTOP , a lifestyle clothing brand in Montana, was experiencing a high bounce rate of 60% on their homepage. “People were visiting the homepage, but were leaving before UPTOP could try to convert them,” Pucko said. After 30 days of using GeoFli software sourced by MaxMind’s data, the number of users that landed on UPTOP’s homepage and visited a second page increased 92%.
SNAPSHOT
Web-based personalization is becoming increasingly popular among online companies and digital marketers. The practice allows a business to identify, segment, and target their visitors in order to serve them personalized content based on some identifiable attribute of the visitor - such as geographical location, browsing history, and demographic data.
In GeoFli’s case, the company identifies visitors through the process of geotargeting . This practice allows websites to serve specific content to visitors based on their geographic location - usually their country, state, or city via their IP address.
GeoFli first reviews the IP address of each visitor. They then do a lookup of that IP address in the GeoIP2 City database in order to determine the visitor’s approximate location. “It’s about delivering the most important, useful content to them at the exact moment they are on a site,” said Taylor McDermott, GeoFli’s online strategist.
GeoFli’s user interface (UI) features a very simple point-and-click layout . Customers select a geographical radius they would like to target through one of three options: Location Library (pre-defined regions), Radius Targeting (a numerical distance - such as 50, 100, etc. miles - from a central point), or Custom Draw (where the user literally draws a polygonal region on a map). GeoFli enables its customers to create website content only visible to internet users originating from IP addresses within a geographic area. So, everyone inside that radius sees specific, localized content relevant to them. Others, (for example, website visitors from Japan) would see regular, nonspecific content. “The software can be used in many different ways, including showing restaurant offers, retail promotions, local news, and community headlines to a specific subset of internet users,” Shontz said.
CHALLENGE
GeoFli co-founders Shontz and Pucko built the service while working together in web development and admissions (respectively) at the University of Montana. According to Shontz, their biggest initial challenges were coming up with a solution that is easy for anyone to use and finding a geolocation service provider whose offerings were reliable, well-regarded, and fast.
Shontz and Pucko searched online for a provider, but could not find exactly what they were looking for. Then a friend told them about MaxMind. “You offered everything we needed: a reliable, industry leader who maintains and updates their product,” Shontz said, adding, “The great thing about MaxMind’s GeoIP2 database – I don’t have to worry about it. It’s fast, updated, and easy to integrate into our code. Because of that, I can just focus on running my business.”
FUTURE
Personalization is forecast to rule the digital landscape in 2017 and beyond. Shontz feels that GeoFli is well-positioned to take advantage of the growing demand for personalization services. “Industries can use us to solve new problems and find new uses for our software – especially in the world of higher education, where we first thought of GeoFli,” Shontz said.
Moving forward, the “sky’s the limit” for GeoFli. “Everyone is thinking about how to make emails and ads more personal,” said McDermott, adding, “Instead, we want to make our customers relevant at one of the first points of contact with their consumers – a website. We have a tool in GeoFli that no other geomarketer has and a great partner in MaxMind behind us to do just that.”
Founded in 2002, MaxMind is an industry-leading provider of IP intelligence and online fraud detection products. To learn more about how our GeoIP databases and services can help you, please visit our website or contact us .