After something of a lull in the development of WordBay - partly because of worries about the EPN program, but also mainly due to summer - I can announce a new version! Thanks to the help of Jez Hopkins, who kindly supplied the essential bit of code, WordBay now offers geotargetting - a much-requested option!

So what are you waiting for - go to your backend and update the WordBay plugin, or download it and install manually from here!

By default, geotargetting is switched OFF in the backend, so you have to check the box if you want to use it. If switched on, the plugin will attempt to determine the geographic location of your visitor and display listings (and a “sign-up” link if you have that option switched on) for the relevant country, hopefully increasing the number of potential customers and therefore sales! If the geo-option is not switched on, it will display the country options you have specified in your backend as default.

NOTE: This will not apply if you are using UK or US eBay and most other major eBay sites, but we made some changes to the country options while we were implementing geotargetting and it is possible that your country has disappeared off the list in the backend! Sorry about this! My next job is to revise the country data and provide a FULL list of ALL countries available through the EPN program. So if your country has disappeared from the backend, please roll back to the previous version of WordBay and hang in there for a few more days while I get that right.

A warning about geotargetting!

Use geotargetting at your own “risk” - the free ip database at hostip.info is bound to have some wrong matches in it, which will cause the wrong country to be displayed in some indeterminate (though probably tolerably small) number of cases. Also, we have been unable to test the targetting for all locales (just can’t find that Belgian proxy!) so please test this out for yourself, maybe use a specially created campaign ID for a couple of days and make sure your stats are showing the right country.

I personally think it is worth the risk of displaying the wrong eBay site on occasion if it means a good number of new potential customers.

So thanks once again Jez for the help!

Other minor improvements

• changed the action of the “…or click here to see similar items” link - this was basically serving no purpose before and usually just showed the same items. It now takes only the first 2 search terms from your keywords and searches on those. This should broaden the search, but it is still pretty clumsy - need a better suggestion - maybe pagination would be a solution in the future
• fixed the bug I flagged up the other day, where complex queries with quotation marks in them were returning empty results. Not sure when that error crept in, but I HAD heard of “urlencode” before, so not sure what happened there…

Let me know how you get on with this version, and remember the current golden rule of eBay affiliate marketing: “thin is NOT in“.

Posted on September 20th, 2008 by markowe
Filed under: Uncategorized