In any marketing campaign, taking your campaign to the target audience is one of the most important factors of success. Has geo-targeting ever been something that defines that target audience? And have you been wondering how to target your banner campaign based on where the visitors are based on? Then your wait is over, two extensions from kulendra.net, kBanners4Joomla and  Geolok , are meant to do exactly that!

Geolok is an extension that allows users to use the visitor's IP to determine the location of the visitor. Geolok comes with pre-built connectivity to three geolocation services and you can choose whatever you like based on your need. The extension identifies geolocation info such as ZipCode, City, Country and also identifies if the user is logged in, the user group and the user ids. Once these information is found, Geolok assigns the information to a global, $_REQUEST and $_SESSION variables.

kBanners4Joomla on the other hand is a pure banner management system that lets users define banner groups based on $_REQUEST variables. And that's what we'll use to connect Geolok and kBanners4Joomla.

To start targeting your banner campaign based on location, first install kBanners4Joomla and Geolok in your system. Geolok and kBanners4Joomla can be installed just like any other plugin/module/component.

Step1: Configure Geolok
Configuring Geolok is pretty much the easiest of all steps. Just select any of the pre-built geo-location services. Now sign up with the geo-location services (all of them have a free service available) and enter the key provided by the geo-location service. Enable the plugin and you are done with the step 1.

Step2: Setting up Banners
Now we are ready to move ahead with configuring kBanners4Joomla, the banner banner manager for Joomla. The first step in this is to set up the banners.

Go to Components->kBanners4Joomla->Banners and click on New to add a new banner to the system. Name the banner with a descriptive name and specify where it should link to in LinkURL. You have the option of setting up the banner as a image banner or an html banner. If you set it up as an html banner, the LinkURL will be ignored.

Once everything is entered, save the banner.

Step3: Setting up Banner Groups
The second step of configuring kBanners4Joomla is to configure Banner Groups. kBanners4Joomla works by invoking Banner Groups based on the Display Rule attached to it. This is where we will bridge with Geolok to set up a rule based on geo-location.

Name the Banner Group with a suitable name for the area you are targeting it to (e.g. New York). Now select the banners that you want to target to this area, and finally move on to setting up Display Rule. 

Step4: Setting up Display Rule
Now we've completed almost all the steps necessary in geo-targeting banners on Joomla and are at the most important stage. The Banner Groups that are set up in kBanners4Joomla are evaluated based on the Display Rule attached to them. If the Display Rule matches the current URL/visitor, then the banners belonging to that group are displayed.

As we want to display banners from this group, only if the user is from New York area, let's set up the following as the display rule:

[geolok_city]=="New York"

and save the Banner Group. (Note: Based on the Geo location service you use, the actual name you have to use may vary. It may be New York or New York City. Please check with the service if you don't get the expected results.)

Step5: Setting up the display module
We are now at the final step of displaying banners based on the location of the visitor. All we need to do is to set up the display module. Just set up kBanners4Joomla module to be displayed in the position and menu items you like just like any other module. When selecting the Banner Groups, select the 'All' option.

What does this do? This tells the module, that the particular module should display banners from all banner groups but based on the Display Rule. This allows you to set up enough Banner Groups in the backend at a later time and they will still be pulled in automatically. On the other hand if you have a set of banner groups specifically meant for say, frontpage, then select the necessary banner groups and the module will pull up banners only from that banner group(s).

So there you are, you have now successfully completed geo-targeting your banners to the visitors! If you are interested in this, you can find more information and product pages of Geolok and kBanners4Joomla on our site.