Back in August, we wrote about the untapped opportunity that is the Australian market for affiliates. Full of savvy consumers, a lack of competition, and great merchant opportunities, Australia should be at the top of your mind if you’re looking to grow your revenue as an affiliate.
But if you’re an affiliate brilliant at producing content, but not at programming a website to target incoming traffic from Australia with different content and ads, the above opportunity might not seem attainable. Let’s change that. Here are two quick and simple ways to dynamically deliver country-specific ads and content to visitors from Australia!
The guide below is tailored for WordPress users, and example screenshots and website content were taken from my personal site, Outdoor-Gear-Reviews.com.
Identify Your Australian Traffic
The Australian opportunity doesn’t mean much if you don’t have traffic from Australia in the first place. Luckily, finding this information is easy if you have Google Analytics enabled on your website (if you don’t, I recommend this excellent Beginner’s Guide to Analytics article by Moz).
Once logged into your Analytics, head over to the Audience navigation option on the left sidebar, select “Geo,” and then “Location”. You’ll then be served up a very tidy map of the world with country-specific hotspots based on the amount of visitors from those countries in the last month (or whatever time period you’ve selected). Here is my traffic by country on Outdoor Gear Reviews:
Towards the bottom you can see an Australian flag as the fifth country listed followed by all of the data associated with visitors from that country. According to my Google Analytics, my fifth largest visitor demographic is originating from Australia; plenty to capitalize on the Australian affiliate opportunity.
As a side note, you’ll also notice that Canada was my third highest country based on visits, meaning that my blog also offers excellent crossover with AvantLink Canada merchants using the tactics outlined below.
Create Country-Specific Content
Great, we have visitors from Australia. Now what?
The next step is to create a different site experience that caters to visitors from the country in question. This could involve a variety of different tactics, but we’ll discuss two easy-to-implement options that are applicable in almost all situations. Additionally, these options are easily configurable by anyone and require no coding or programming skills.
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- Australian merchant ads for Australian visitors: Let’s start with the first and likely most applicable option–serving ads that are relevant to your Australian visitors. This will involve delivering banner ads that are sourced from country-specific merchants if a visitor’s IP address shows they’re from that country. Dynamic delivery of ads based on IP addresses, you say? If you’re already thinking “yeah right, that’s not happening”, fret not, we’ll talk about how to easily do this below.
For now, concentrate on the first step with this tactic, which is selecting the country-specific ads you would like to serve in place of your current affiliate ads to visitors from Australia. These ads are found in your affiliate account on AvantLink.com.au for any merchants you are currently an affiliate for. Take a look at the Australian merchant page for more great affiliate program opportunities or apply if you haven’t joined the network yet.
- Australian merchant ads for Australian visitors: Let’s start with the first and likely most applicable option–serving ads that are relevant to your Australian visitors. This will involve delivering banner ads that are sourced from country-specific merchants if a visitor’s IP address shows they’re from that country. Dynamic delivery of ads based on IP addresses, you say? If you’re already thinking “yeah right, that’s not happening”, fret not, we’ll talk about how to easily do this below.
- “Product Search” landing page for Australian visitors: Say for a moment you have a “best deals” page or product search tool on your website. As an example, take the price comparison tool page I have built on Outdoor Gear Reviews using the oh-so-simple SnapSearcher tool (<– seriously, check that out if you haven’t).
This price comparison tool works great, but has been configured for US visitors to my website and sources products and prices from US merchants. I want to add another price comparison tool on a different page that is populated only with products and prices from Australian merchants. The goal is to have that page delivered and shown to any visitor that is from Australia, resulting in a price comparison tool that is entirely relevant to their location and merchants.
Serving Australian Ads To Australian Traffic
Australian traffic? Check. Country-specific content and site experience? Check. Now let’s talk about how to technically accomplish the goal of delivering different content to people visiting your site from different countries.
From a high-level, serving visitors specific content based on their location and their IP addresses is complicated work. Luckily for us, the WordPress community is full of developers who have done that complex work, allowing us to serve different ads to different visitors by simply uploading a WordPress plugin and configuring a few options.
Location-Specific Ad Serving Plugins: Ad management plugins are among the most popular plugins for WordPress. There are a lot offered with varying functionality, but we’re looking for ones that can handle serving different ads to visitors based on their location. Generally speaking, these plugins have you set up the functionality in similar ways. Most involve dedicating a specific section on your website where the ads will be served, then populating the plugin with the ads for your normal visitors and then ads for your country-specific visitors. You also indicate which ads you would like to show as default and which ads should replace the default ones if a visitor is from Australia.
Below are several plugin suggestions. However, be aware that serving different ads based on location is a premium paid feature for each. Prices range from $32- $69. Note that AvantLink has no affiliation with the plugins below or their developers. Click the links below to learn more.
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- WP Ad Guru ($50/year)
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- AdRotate for WordPress (Roughly $32, one-time purchase)
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- AdvancedAds Pro for WordPress ($69/year)
Location-Specific Page Redirect Plugins: Based on the price comparison tool page example mentioned a moment ago, we need our plugin to ID Australian visitors on that page and automatically redirect them to the Australian version of that price comparison tool. Just like the plugins we mentioned above, configuring this redirect rule is simple and relatively similar across any plugin listed below. Typically, these plugins will have you configure a simple scenario that says “if a visitor from X country visits Y page, send them to Z page instead”.
Click on the suggested plugins below to see screenshots and support docs about setting up location redirects. Again, AvantLink has no affiliate with these plugins or their creators.
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- GeoTargeting Lite ($45/year)
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- GeoRedirect (Free with branding, otherwise pay-per-visit)
- IP2Location (Free, attribution required)
The Early Bird Gets The Worm
This tutorial is a simple introduction into the world of location-based content serving. As you can probably imagine, there are many additional scenarios in which this technology can be of value and applications that are far more technical than what was discussed above. The more you dive into serving relevant content to country-specific visitors, the more you can capitalize on untapped markets and opportunities in the affiliate marketing world.
