Since we’ve been talking about statistical analysis lately at OMG, I thought I’d give you another oft-overlooked statistic. Referring Countries are a statistic that shows what country people are viewing your site from. It can be found in your Google Analytics stat by checking out the “visitors” and then “map overlay”. It may not sound like it, but knowing the physical location of your visitors is another step toward leveraging the traffic from that specific country.

For example, most of my readers come from the USA, which doesn’t tell me much. But, if you look at number 3 on my list, it’s the UK. What does this tell me? I need to blog more about tea and crumpets, and maybe through Prince Harry’s name around a bit. Ok, not so much, but it does tell me that I can tailor some of my content to fit their needs, and perhaps earn me even more traffic from the UK. For example, Myspace is the most popular social networking sites in the USA, but did you know that Bebo ranks right behind Myspace in visitors from the UK? That might be worth noting if you do a lot of posting on Myspace marketing. You might want to sign up for a Bebo account, and start writing about marketing on Bebo as well.

Still skeptical? Let’s try another example. Let’s say that you are marketing an info product like “How To Design Websites”. While this could be quite profitable, it’d be even more profitable if you did some research. If you are from an English speaking country, you are most likely going to target English speaking countries such as the USA, Canada, UK, Australia, etc. - but, wait just one second… what if you also paid some extra cash to have your product translated into other languages? Take India for example… a very tech savvy country, that has a lot of demand for web designers. Go ahead and laugh… you’ll see my point right here. If you combine the population of the USA, Canada, UK, and Australia (according to Wikipedia) - you would have a target audience of roughly 418,588,025 - which is a lot of people. But here is my point… India is a tech friendly country, and it has a population that is over 1 Billion people. That’s over double the population of the USA, Canada, UK, and Australia COMBINED! See where I’m going with this? But the key is to choose countries that match your target audience, not just countries that have a huge population. For a web design info product, India would definitely fit the bill.

On the same note as choosing countries that match your target audience, not just those that have a huge population, I’m wiling to bet that larger isn’t necessarily better. Take Japan for example. If you have your product translated into Japanese, I would be willing to be that although Japan has roughly 1/1oth the traffic of India, it would convert better. Japanese people are probably the most tech savvy of any other country, and the income of the average person is about 2 times higher than that of the average person in India. So let’s do the analysis, more income, more tech savvy, less population - or more population, less income, and not quite as tech savvy (but not far off). Either way, you can’t go wrong. If it were me forming a marketing plan based on geo-targeting it’d go something like this -

1. Make two different websites or landing pages
2. Buy traffic from Google Adwords
3. Use the geo-targeting feature on Adwords to send Japanese traffic to one page, and Indian traffic to another
4. Sell the product for $99 to the Japanese visitor (more income!), and $49 to the Indian visitor(1/2 the amount because the income for the average person is roughly 1/2 that of a Japanese person)

See how geo-targeting makes sense now? I’m using statistical analysis to make more money from Japanese visitors because I know they are more likely to be able to afford it, and it’s an in demand item. Web design would definitely be something you could sell to a web savvy country, so you’ll just have to test and tweak the formula after that. I’m selling the same product to Indian people for 1/2 the price because they make less money, but since there are more of them, I would probably make just as much as I did for the Japanese targeted web page.
These are just small examples of how this works. Methods like this are advanced, and they require creativity, but they are what sets a profitable blog apart from an average blog. Knowing where your traffic comes from (location) is important, but it’s definitely not the only stat that you need to research. It’s one small piece of a big pie that you need to slice up and devour at different intervals.

My point is this - If a country is bringing you a significant amount of traffic, you should start trying to accommodate it as best as possible. This only brings you more of that traffic later on, and isn’t that what building a blog is all about? You have to actively seek traffic, and then find ways to leverage it. One of the ways to do so is by geo-targeting. I used an example that may not apply to every blog, but the method that I gave you can be customized to fit just about any situation, or any blog.

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