How To Geotarget Ads On Your WordPress Site

If you want to maximize the revenue you get from your website, you need to find a way to show the right ads to the right people.

For example, if you have an affiliate offer that’s only available to people from the USA, it doesn’t make any sense to display that same offer to visitors from Europe, right? That’s just wasted potential…

Or, even if your ad applies to everyone, sometimes cultural differences mean that people in different locations might not respond as well to that ad.

To make sure that you’re always showing the best ad possible no matter where someone is browsing from, you can display different ads based on a user’s geolocation.

In this post, we’ll show you how to do that for your WordPress site!

How To Display Different Ads Based On Geolocation In WordPress

To geotarget the ads on your WordPress site, you can use the Geotargeting Pro plugin from Geotargeting WP.

This plugin can help you geotarget any type of content on your WordPress site – ads included!

We’ll show you two common use cases:

• Geotargeting an ad that you include in a sidebar widget
• Geotargeting an ad that you include in your content

For both uses, all you’ll need is Geotargeting Pro installed and activated to get started.

How To Geotarget A Sidebar Ad In WordPress

To get started, head to the widget that contains your ad. If you don’t already have such a widget, the Custom HTML widget is a good option.

You should now have a new Geotargeting section on each widget:

You can choose to either:

• Only show the widget in specific countries (to target those locations)
• Never show the widget in specific locations (to exclude those locations and target everywhere else)

Note that you can create multiple widgets with different targeting conditions. For example, if you wanted to use three ads like this:

• Ad A targets Country A
• Ad B targets Country B and Country C
• Ad C targets the rest of the world

Then you could configure your three widgets like:

• Widget 1: Only show in Country A
• Widget 2: Only show in Country B and Country C
• Widget 3: Don’t show in Country A or Country B or Country C (this makes it display everywhere else except the three countries that you specifically targeted)

How To Geotarget In-Content Ads In WordPress

If you’d rather geotarget ads that you use in your actual content, you can use the Geotargeting Shortcode builder:

The principles are identical to the widget method above – you can include or exclude certain countries to target ads to specific countries and then, if desired, create a single fallback ad that displays everywhere else.

Just make sure to include your ad code inside the shortcode like so:

Other Tips For Geotargeting Ads In WordPress

Finally, let’s end with a few more tips for how to geotarget ads in WordPress.

First off, if you’re already using an ad management plugin to inject ads in your WordPress site, you can still use the Geotargeting Pro shortcodes to geotarget your content as long as your ad management plugin allows shortcodes in the ad blocks.

Second, Geotargeting Pro also includes PHP functions that give you more flexibility for working with ad management plugins or inserting ads directly into your theme’s template files.

You can read more about these PHP functions in this help article.

By using the PHP functions, or the shortcodes in conjunction with an ad management plugin, you can do things like automatically insert a geotargeted ad below the title of every post on your site or after the content of every post on your site.

Finally, Geotargeting Pro also includes something called Regions that lets you set up groups of countries or cities so that you can target them as a single entity. This is helpful if you wanted to, say, target a single ad towards all of Europe.

You could create one Region for the entire continent, rather than individually targeting each country. You can access this setting by going to GeoTargetingWP → Settings:

If you’re interested in a more general look at how you can use this plugin, check out our post on how to customize WordPress content based on a user’s location.