One of the most important facets of personalization is geolocational content. The simplest example is when you enter Amazon and you see it automatically goes to your local Amazon website rather than Amazon US. When you see local references on a website, it definitely stands out in the eyes of the visitor and earns a high level of credibility against possible competitors. In this post, we’ll walk you through how to change content based on location on your WordPress website without writing a single line of code.
Businesses use geolocational differences in a variety of activities and areas from regional pricing to territorial licensing, location-based advertising campaigns and localized SERP (search engine results page). It’s not just restaurants, retail shops and service providers who are making use of geolocational marketing. Many of your competitors might be already be using it to:
Reduce CAC (customer acquisition cost)
Increase ROI (return on investment)
Increase conversion rate
Increase stickiness
Promote loyalty
In this article, we’ll explore ways to practice geolocational website personalization for WooCommerce and provide some tips on how you can effectively change content based on location on your WordPress website.
What is Geo-targeting?
Geo-targeting the process of determining a website visitor’s geographical location and personalizing the content according to that location. This ranges from translated content to cultural symbols and references that signify to that location.
Why does it matter?
Let’s say you enter a crowd of people where you don’t know anyone and no one knows you. Then suddenly, someone greets you by name – how would you feel? And how much higher are the chances that the person who called you by name gets to talk to you and possibly make a sale? The answer: a lot!
The marketing/advertising industry is constantly looking for ways to deliver the most personalized possible message to you so that messages stand out from the crowd. Sometimes, their attempts are simply too much and end poorly with privacy violation lawsuits. While this is beyond the scope of this article, there’s no doubt that the days of the one-size-fits-all message are long gone. And if you want to join the personalization game, changing content based on location on your WordPress website may be the first area to improve.
How to approach geolocational marketing
Think regional, not just play it
The key to successfully attracting a visitor’s attention by locational personalization is to discover the values in their locational context and deeply implement that into your marketing and even product design strategy. One of the secrets of WordPress cross-cultural success and popularity is its translatability and the huge polyglot enthusiasts who work to translate the CMS to their fellow users from the same geographical location. This is a result of ‘thinking regionally’ in product design and development.
Your local marketing strategy should also be well-informed about the locations and their role in your business. You should discover locational funnels to your website, improve those that are poor and amplify and expand those that are working.
Constantly build and improve your regional insight
Once you researched and discovered the important locational funnels, you should think of ways to optimize your message to those locations. You may even need to run a deep market research or get help from the local agencies or professionals to help you with that.
What are the major cultural specifications in this country or city?
How can you use them to fine tune a marketing campaign about your product or service?
What currency is used in this location, and how does your pricing compare to it?
Test geotargeting yourself
Put yourself in your target location’s shoes and look at your content. See how it looks from there. Does it really matter for you to see that personalization, or it will look like an undercooked attempt to just steal attention? Would it affect your engagement rate at all?
Let’s roll up our sleeves and see how we can do geolocational personalization by following the points mention above. We will use Growmatik’s to practice the following steps.
Step 1 > Determine visitor locations
The first step towards efficiently changing content based on location on WordPress website is to unveil locational funnels on your website. Your investigation has two main parts:
1- Which locations are sending the most traffic?
Many standard marketing and analytics tools show you the traffic location.
Google Analytics
In Google Analytics, go to Audience > Geo > Location.
Google analytics
You can see the different locations sorted based on the users they referred along with other information such the average session length, bounce rate and conversions from each item. You can click on the country to see different states and cities within that state.
Growmatik
Find customer journey in WordPress from Sidebar > Customer Journey. The first column from the left is called Location, which lists the top countries based on the traffic they refer.
2- What do the people from those locations do on your website after arrival?
Using the Growmatik customer journey feature, you can gain a deep insight into what people from different locations do on your website. Find the customer journey from Sidebar > Customer Journey.
Click on one of the countries and see what its users have done within other columns: Source, Landing Page, Subscription and Purchase Product. For example, by selecting Germany, you can gain the following insight:Germans → were mostly referred by Google, arrived in landing page B, signed up via the popup form X and purchased Denims
You can also narrow down your search to a more specific funnel by selecting more filters after location. For example, once the country is selected from the Location column, select a specific landing page as well which will mean:Users from Germany + that landed on landing page B → are mostly referred by Google search ads and have mostly bought hats.
By using this tool, you can find the top location and also play around with singular or compound factors to discover all funnels involving the top locations on your website. Once you acquire that knowledge, you can begin ideating regional personalizations for the top locations.
Step 2 > Apply geo-targeting to WordPress
You need a way to automatically apply your desired action when traffic from an important location has arrived. There are different ways to personalize your WordPress website. You can code it from scratch or use readymade tools. When selecting a tool, always check the automation building structure. Some WordPress automation tools will leave you with WordPress backend settings and nested meta options to create a simple automation tool.
An ideal automation tool gives you an easy but comprehensive automation building possibility that is run by a simple “IF this THEN that” logic. You can define locational segments of any kind and simply assign an action you want done to them.
Important actions you need in your automation include:
Personalization Always make sure your automation solution has in-page personalization capabilities that allow you to personalize part of a page for a segment without needing to create a brand new page to redirect just because of small change.
Redirection Use redirection when you want to practice large amounts of changes for a location. For example, you want to redirect your target to an entirely different page or domain. Your automation tool should conduct the redirection within the browser (not via HTTP level redirection) so it won’t affect your page SEO.
In the next section, I’ll provide sample locational personalizations and will use Growmatik to create them in WordPress.
Sample geolocational Personalization
Show a geolocal landing page
As part of geographically personalizing your WordPress website, you can create a landing page personalized for the country you are targeting. Personalization can vary from redirection to an independent domain and website like yourbrand.de for that region with a particular design and other personalized content on the same landing page. You can translate the content of the entire page with tools such as WeGlot and TranslatePress and tweak the design if necessary (for example, in Persian- and Arabic-speaking countries, you should put the translated content into a right to left layout).
Use the Growmatik’s Show Page action to redirect users of a particular location to a different page than your default homepage.
Customize your logo
Tweaking your logo based on the audience’s location can increase their trust in your brand as an online business. For example, Amazon Turkey or Sony Deutschland.
Use the Growmatik webpage personalizer to replace your global logo with another image and create an automation to show the personalized page to visitors from Germany.
Redirect to a subdomain
If you want to take a step further in localizing your business in the target area, you can create a website over a subdomain like france.yourbrand.com and redirect people. This is an effective method if you want your localized website visible to search engines.
You will need to create automation to redirect visitors from France to the subdomain.
Localize call-to-actions
A call-to-action might be more important than the rest of the content in certain landing pages. If you don’t have time and resources to translate and localize an entire page you can consider translating only the call to actions. Your target location’s visitors might know English but will be happy to see a call to action in the local language and possibly with an exclusive deal or coupon for that region.
Use Growmatik webpage personalizer to customize call-to-actions and then use it in an automation rule for visitors of your location.
Display a regional welcome Message
That will be a great first impression to personalize your landing hero section with a localized greeting message – for example ‘hire the best properties to rent in India’ to show to an Indian visitor and ‘The best real estate investment opportunities in Dubai’ to a visitor from the UAE.
Using the Growmatik personalizer, replace the heading or slogan in your hero section and use it in a locational automation. Visitors from that location will see the edited version in your hero section.
Provide seasonal offers by region
Provide exclusive pricing or discount campaigns for areas that matter and bolden it in your landing page. It is good if you follow the local calendar and occasions to run your campaigns.
By using the Growmatik personalizer, create a section inside your homepage including your regional that will be only visible to visitors from that location.
Show in-store popups by region
Display promotional campaign popups that get triggered for visitors of a region.
You can create popups with the Growmatik popup builder or choose one of its readymade templates and simply connect it to an automation rule with the location condition.
