Digital Marketing with Web Cookies and IP addresses: Part 2

 

In the previous article, we discussed how you can utilize web cookies to aid some of your targeted marketing campaigns especially those that run on Google Ad platforms. It is no doubt that web cookie make audience targeting a lot easier, however, IP address, another type of tracking is also a good variable to understand and utilize. IP address tracking another tool that businesses can utilize rightfully, as these may cause an infringement to laws.

 

In part two of this series, we’ll discuss what IP addresses are, what information you could potentially harvest and the pros and cons of using it to market, let’s start!

 

 

IP Addresses, what are they?

An IP address is a unique number that gets linked to your physical location. Other than helping the network determine where to send information to, IP addresses can also act as a form of tracking for those who know how to utilize it for digital marketing.

 

What information could ip address tracking harvest?

Since IP address are linked to physical locations, once you know your visitor’s location, you can easily cross reference other data about them to refine your targeting. With IP address tracking, you are able to identify information that is more demographic in nature as compared to the user’s purchasing habits with web cookies.

 

Things like:

• Household Income
• of Children in the home
• Education levels

 

However, you have to be careful when taking the data into consideration because most households have more than one device and each device can have more than one user. Hence, data harvested might be super generalized or even downright incorrect with ip address tracking due to the nature of devices and household digital items.

If you are in the B2B industry, most office also share the same IP address for all company devices or even route it through a IT hub making the information appear as if the physical location seem incorrect.

Lastly, with the rising trend of using VPNs, IP addresses are getting harder and harder to accurately track, making it a slightly less unreliable tool. Thus, ip address tracking might not be ultimately the best solution to retarget or remarket your audiences.

 

So what is the best approach? IP addresses or Web cookies? Well, we say both! If you utilize both web cookies and IP addresses simultaneously, you will be able to know which companies are visiting our website and what kind of people are visiting. Targeting your market audience using both can help you to maximize your ROI by marketing to your exact market directly.

If you would like to talk strategy or need help ensuring you are reaching and influencing your target consumers effectively, on the right devices, at the right time, with the right message, contact Adssential Marketing today for a full analysis of your existing digital marketing campaigns!