If I go to www.cnn.com, on the front page in the upper right corner I see an ad for “$510,000 Mortage for Under $1498/Month!” Does everyone see those same numbers when they go to cnn.com? Try it and let me know if it’s different. Oh, and I know there is some degree of targeting happening, because there is a specific mention of the state where I live.
The reason I’m wondering is these numbers are remarkably similar to the apparent income levels and house prices in my area (observation suggests that we have upper-middle-class people in homes larger than they need, borrowing a lot more than they can reasonably afford). But IP address lookups supposedly only cover a broad geographical area, a large part of a state.
I know that overborrowing is something of a national trend, but these numbers would probably look pretty silly in some other regional markets. Since they are eerily similar to what I think my local market is like, I wonder if they are somehow programatically targeted.
In general, many sites do geo-targeting. This is done by either:
Taking your IP address, and making deductions from there. This puts AOL users in Virginia and other oddities, but works OK a lot of the time.
If you’ve entered your zip code on any site, and that site shares the information with an ad network (read those privacy policies) then any other site that is part of that ad network knows your zip code and targets appropriately.
Commercial IP geolocation services are much more sophisticated now than in the past, when they often just looked up where the domain name is registered.
Dose it really? I get my internet service from time warner. But the geo location link above places me correctly. When you dial up to AOL you are not calling Virginia you are calling a local number the phone to internet conversion happens there. I would think that the IP addresses that get assigned are going to be reasonably local.
Yeah, generally they should be able to figure out where your little subnet connects into the larger network. And that shouldn’t be too far from where you are, otherwise your performance will suck.