Geo targeting

[zFidel]

Question to community,

Does anyone have issues with geo targeting? It often happens that buyer sees impressions from Turkey (just an example) when our servers' geo delivery option is set to United States only. Or vice versa. The main point is that other servers see different originating geo than we do.

It is happening more often with mobile-web audience and when we deliver for mobile-oriented buyers.

I'd highly appreciate any feedback and any suggestions how this can be resolved.

Edited August 24, 2015 by zFidel

[tkat]

Hello zFidel,

Are you subscribing to a geotargeting database?  The database changes constantly so you should probably update it at least once or twice a month.  If you are relying on the nominal one that comes free with the server, it won't be reliable at all.  We subscribe to the Maxmind GeoIPCity database which seems to agree pretty well with DFA/Google.

[shfischer]

Hi tkat.. are you using a specific continent or the worldwide?

Can I just use the mmdb file?

Seth

[zFidel]

Hi tkat,
Thanks for your suggestion. I completely agree with you.
But.. as I said, "It often happens that buyer sees impressions from...." often, not always. Sometimes we seeing close to 100% compatibility with other ad servers. I assume that the issue connected with this option: "Try to determine the real IP address of viewers behind a proxy server". What would you say?

[tkat]

Hey Seth,

We use the GeoIOCity, which lets us target by city or DMA (designated market area), or of course by country or state (province) of any nation.  The price depends on the degree of specificity you need.  If you're just targeting an entire continent, you probably don't need a very large one and the price would be fairly low, I would imagine.

Hey zFidel,

Yes, we do see some geotargeting discrepancy with Doubleclick (Google) but generally it's not bad.  For some reason, in the SF DMA there seems to be a lot of impressions that are seen by Revive's targeting as SF DMA but which Doubleclick sees as China.  This happens despite us having set it to determine the real IP address of viewers behind a proxy server.  We think it's because some Chinese use proxies based in the SF Bay area to view US-based sites to get around their government's restrictions. So, yes, proxy servers will cause this discrepancy but setting Revive to seek out the real IP doesn't seem to prevent it.