Geo-targeting by country and city

Brand Central provides publishers the option to cap ad impressions based on geo-targeting options such as countries and cities. This article describes how to modify Brand Central ad launch codes and add the geo-targeting capping parameter.

How to add country or city capping to publisher ad tag?

When downloading the ad tag from Brand Central’s ad tag site, publishers receive documentation on how to modify the ad tags by adding additional parameters. An example of an ad tag page can be found here:

https://mybrandcentral.com/tags/?id=MTIxNzl8NTg0fGNqa0VJVVk0NjcA

Based on the campaign target audience and its strategic direction, publishers may want to restrict the campaign (or individual flights) to certain countries or cities, or prevent certain countries or cities from being exposed to the ad of a flight. This can be achieved via two new parameters bcGeoCountry and bcGeoCity which can be appended to the launch code provided on the publishers ad tag page.

The syntax for the parameters is as follows:

&bcGeoCountry=ALLOW:DE,AE,QR
--> ad ONLY shown if user from Germany, U.A.E. or Qatar

&bcGeoCountry=ALLOW:DE
--> ad ONLY shown if user from Germany

&bcGeoCountry=DISALLOW:OM,RU
--> ad ALWAYS shown except if user from Oman or Russia    

&bcGeoCity=ALLOW:Dubai,Berlin
--> ad ONLY shown if user from Berlin or Dubai

&bcGeoCity=DISALLOW:Sharjah
--> ad ALWAYS shown except if user from Sharjah

The allow, disallow, country parameter and cities can be in UPPER or lower case or cOmBINation of both. No spaces between allow/disallow command and parameters, and the country and city list can have unlimited parameters.

If the flight parameter prevent the ad from being shown, either Brand Central internal ad inventory or an empty spacer.gif banner in the relevant size is being shown with descriptive <ALT> and <TITLE> text information showing the detected city/country and ALLOW/DISALLOW parameters.

What can geo-targeting be used for?

Geo-targeting by country or city can be particularly helpful for restricting certain internet users in the world from being exposed to an ad, for example: A bank is preparing for an IPO campaign that has legal restrictions to show the marketing efforts only in a certain country, or preventing from being seen in another country. The allow and disallow country command cater for that.

Another example could be to limit media wastage by restricting banners shown through Brand Central only to users to a certain city, where an event is being promoted.

The options are endless, and the combination of allowing or disallowing countries and/or cities to be included in the geo-targeting capping options of Brand Central provides flexibility to those publishers who do not have this functionality as part of their ad servers.

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