Geolocation Magic Macros

The Geolocation Magic Macros plugin for Revive Adserver, Magic Geo in short, enables you to dynamically insert the name of the geographic location of a visitor into a banner. This can be used in both the HTML code and the destination URL. Using this new feature, you can automatically make a banner adjust its content to the location of a visitor.

This page explains why geolocation is not an exact science, resulting in potentially inaccurate results for the location names being displayed.

A note about accuracy

Geolocation is not always completely accurate. It uses information that’s published by internet providers around the world. Companies like MaxMind conduct extensive research to complete this information. For example: some internet providers haven’t taken the trouble to assign the IP addresses they hand out to their customers to the actual geographic locations, but instead they report all of those IP addresses to be located at the address of their company headquarter. MaxMind attempts to find the correct locations. This is a time consuming and intensive process.

MaxMind publishes a free version of the country and city data files, called GeoLite2. They have paid version of both as well, called GeoIP2, which are much more accurate.

In addition, there are datafiles that contain information on  organisation, ISP, and so on.

What you see here is a banner displaying most of the available Geolocation Magic Macros, so you can see how accurate the output is for your current geographical location. Some values may remain empty when they are not defined for your location or not available with the GeoLite2 data file being used.