Where the audience is matters a lot for advertisers

by Brendan Maxwell on 16 Sep 2014 Hungry late at night, you Google ‘pizza’ and magically without entering your suburb your local pizza places appear. How? It’s called geo-location.

Each computer has a unique address an Internet Protocol (IP address) and the first part of the IP address is like your bank account number, which identifies your bank and branch physical location, so too does your IP address.

Geolocation works by automatically looking up that unique IP address on a six million line WHOIS service and retrieving your local internet service provider’s address. e.g. Telstra Gosford or TPG Southport Gold Coast Queensland, so it will in urban areas place you generally within 25km.

So when you go to www.sail-world.com all this happens Sail-World has for the last 15 years sent Kiwi readers to Sail-World New Zealand, where they read stories about P Class and Starling class boats and other arcane Kiwi sailing stories and are exposed to New Zealand advertisers.´Similarly in Asia, Canada, the USA, UK and Europe, but nowadays we use the geolocation tables to drill down much more.

In Europe, where Sail-World is the largest sailing news source (it has over 20% of our worldwide traffic) German visitors to Sail-World see ads in German, Spanish in Spain, French in France and can if they wish read the sailing news in their own languages.

On the Aussie local scene, we can serve Queensland adds north of the Tweed and Victorian ads from Mallacoota south.

Who cares?

Advertisers care, or if they don’t they certainly need to!

If your business is a Melbourne based chandlery, it’s a fair bet that 90% of your business is done with Victorians, so you cannot justify advertises nationally. Now you can adsvertise locally with us.

A marine company doing business Australia-wide needs to fine tune according to the calendar too. Telling the market you will be exhibiting at the Sanctuary Cove International Boat Show, you may want to direct 70% of your advertising to Queensland and most of the balance to NSW and Victoria in the month ahead of that show then switch those figures around ahead of the Sydney Boat Show. Targeted advertising is the best and most effective advertising you can do.

Across the 31 sites in the TetraMedia Sail-World, Sail-World Cruising, Power-Boat World, FishingBoating-World and MarineBusiness-World this technology offers enormous flexibility.

An Australian exporter active on the International Show circuit can for instance specify for the month before METS in November it wants to increase the intensity of its display ads on Sail-World Europe, which is the largest sailing website in Europe and ease back on its American advertising and in January the company may decide, ahead of the Miami Boat Show, may decide to switch its advertising effort there.

There is enormous flexibility within the system to deliver the maximum value for advertisers.

I, to my shame, know that in the print days I would run the same ad for three or four months in a magazine. I did not realise that anybody interested in the product or service I was promoting was going to contact me quite quickly and after that I was running wallpaper.

But online where the banner impressions and click thrus are available for ads what becomes immediately obvious is that that is what happens.

If someone is interested in a product or service they click on it and then responses ease back. For that reason it is important with online advertising to keep fresh material in front of the market and also to promote ranges of products.

One of the things that can happen right across the TetraMedia group is that advertisers can run up to five different ad campaigns running day about, reaching different market segments, it’s an elegant solution, with those click thrus going to different URL,’s ( web addresses). New ads going into the deck and old one come out.

One for big boats one for dinghies, etc. and this means it’s more work generating ads but the payoff is there. We help with the ad generation.

If you are contemplating advertising targeted advertising delivers big pay-offs

You can change ads every few weeks as many of our advertisers do, and target your audience locally. You can dial up percentages 50% in WA, SA, and NT for this month, 80% in Queensland next month, with ads pointing to your local distributors.

You need flexibility and that’s what the TetraMedia system, across Sail-World, Sail-World Cruising, Powerboat-World, Marinebusiness-World, and Fishingboating-world can deliver.

If you want to know more please contact Brendan Maxwell at TetraMedia on 0280061873 or advertising@tetra-media.com or Jeni Bone on 0412 230 002 or editor@marinebusiness-world.com