Do you tailor the content or the way it is presented on your site for your visitors?

[MichaelCorfman]

There are lots of ways webmasters can potentially tailor the content on their site based on the characteristics of a visitor.

For example, if the ip address of a visitor indicated they are in a particular country, you could dynamically features sites that accept play from that country. Or if your site is visited using a mobile device you could alter the way the site is displayed to work better on smaller screen sizes. Or if you support a login function, or cookies, you could tailor the site based on information the user has given you or based on preferences you establish based on information you know about the visitor.

As a very simple example, inn the case of the GPWA website, if the forum is being viewed on a mobile device, the visitor is asked if they want to use the tapatalk mobile forum app interface to view the forums.

For this week's question, I am curious to find out the extent to which GPWA webmasters tailor the content or presentation of material on their site for individual visitors. And if you do tailor your site especially for your visitors, please share the details of what you do.

Michael

[universal4]

I had to vote No, but with a disclaimer that I may in the future.

Rick
Universal4

[baldidiot]

I didn't vote because it's 'sometimes'...

On some sites I use responsive themes for mobile devices (mainly those targeted at mobile users, like mobileslots.co), but a lot of the time I just lay the site out so that it can easily be read fairly easily on any device without the layout changing (eg: bestbettingsites.org.uk). This is probably mainly because mobile sites (that I read) often drive me nuts.

I have also dabbled with geotargeting in the past on my non-UK specific sites to show a different table or banner depending on what country the user is from, but this is only one or two sites.

I did try serving custom content once, where the bonuses/currencies/lists (etc..) adjusted depending on what country the user was from, but it was just too much upkeep and super heavy on the resources.

So... sometimes.

[TravG]

I say I do but the only thing I have done is create a mobile version of the website and only for 2 of the websites I own. In all honesty I have not seen a lot of activity from the mobile sites so I doubt I will make a mobile version for anymore of the sites. With the screen being so big these days on phones a truly "mobile version" of a website, I feel, is almost obsolete. I try to make my sites pretty free of "clutter" so it displays well on a smaller screen anyway.

I would like to start to do some geo targeting but I need to research it a little more.

[Christiaan]

I don't tailor my content at the moment. And I won't do it at my current sites for now. But I'm working on a new website that will be much more advanced and will tailor the content. For example a different layout for mobile.

[Sherlock]

nobody can afford to go without geotargetting unless has audience from one market

interesting would be to have a list geotargetting friendly aff programmes... so far not so good...

bet365 has geo only on landing pages
unibet has some geocreeatives but they often do not work (e.g. they write it is live betting banner for 13 countries, but in some countries it is casino etc)
SIA tries for geo, but is totally ****** up

if anyone knows other, pls mention them, even when we have servers that recognize country, to put there and update all the creatives is a mess

[MichaelCorfman]

Part of the reason I had content tailoring for site visitors on my mind when posted this poll is that at Casino City we've been working on a project to introduce additional visitor customization into the site. We actually deployed the work we have done thusfar the day after I started the poll, so I can share what we have done now.

A number of years ago, when the UIGEA first became law in the United States, Casino City began a focus on showing which online casino sites were available to visitors in a particular jurisdiction based on the visitor’s IP address. And we also began showing only sites offering play in the language the user had set as their browser language of preference.

But, this past week, we innovated further and have now taken the way we tailor information presented to Online Casino City visitors to a level deeper. As an example, if a site visitor is in Australia, we continue to recognize their location from their ip address, and if their browser language preference is English, we also continue to recognize that fact, as we have for some time. But now, knowing that the currency used in Australia is Australian dollars, we also automatically tailor the information we show the visitor to only include sites that accept deposits in Australian dollars in addition to showing sites supporting English and accepting play from Australia. In this example, filtering the sites presented in this fashion automatically reduces the relevant online gaming sites to only 10% of those contained in our database. Before, without considering currencies accepted, some filtering took place, but it was pretty limited. 70% of online gaming sites support English and accept Australian players without factoring in accepted currencies. So we used to removed just 30% of available sites when tailoring our content for the typical Australian visitor. That compares with the 90% of sites removed today. Although it is too early to tell, we believe the result will be a better experience for our Australian visitors in terms of finding sites where it is easy for them to deposit.

As another example, a French Canadian resident living in Quebec is now automatically shown only the 5% of sites in our database that support French and accept Canadian players depositing Canadian dollars. That is only about a quarter as many sites as we used to show French Canadian players.

Visitors can, of course, change the preferences used to filter the sites they are shown. You can see how we do this by visiting the web page online.casinocity.com/preferences.cfm.

Michael

[TheGooner]

Geo-targeting advertising banners is essential for us - we get visitors from 170 different countries on an average month.

In terms of lists and recommendations - some of our pages have specific sections for particular geo-target groups.

[DanHorvat]

I'm arguing against too much customization, and giving the visitor all information instead so he can make up his mind. If I were to target bookies which are in Croatian language and accept deposits in Croatian kuna, I think I'd be down to 1 bookie or 2. And so would you guys if you'd tailor the content for Croatian visitors in that way.

What if those two bookies suck? What if the "Croatian visitor" is a Swedish guy on holiday?

My main objection is that an assumption on who or what the visitor is could might as well be wrong. There are wives using husband's PC and vice versa, there are people from Mexico temporarily living in Quebec, there are people with multi-currency cards, there are British people going on vacation in Spain. Or Africa. There are people in the UK barely speaking English. The website visitor could also be using an IP changer program. Or the visitor just wants to bet at Pinnacle and that's it, even if they don't have his language or currency.

As a website visitor, I hate customizations. Earlier this year I was in Barcelona and Paris, and it was irritating to see Yahoo Mail change to the languages I barely understand based on the assumption that I was Spanish/French. Although my account information clearly says I'm Croatian. Big mistake. Google also started to behave differently.

Whenever you're tailoring content the main things to consider are 1) does the information you have reflect the truth about the visitor, 2) how certain are you that the visitor needs more/less of some content.

French Canadian resident living in Quebec is now automatically shown only the 5% of sites in our database that support French and accept Canadian players depositing Canadian dollars.

I actually looked it up, French is the native language of 78% of people living in Quebec (although more can speak French let's stick to this number). The accuracy of geotargeting on a country level is 90-95% and on a regional or city level is goes down to 60-70% (and not all geotargeting engines are equally good either), and for the sake of argument let's assume 10% of people are travelers from another country or something else which would totally exclude them from the target group. If we assume the geotargeting engine is 70% correct about people really coming from Quebec, then the decision to remove non-French-Canadian content would be justified 49% of the time (0.78 x 0.7 x 0.9). Even if you'd go with 94% of the people who understand French in Quebec, and even if regional geotargeting would be 90% accurate, that still sums up to 76%, even for such a region with almost no demographic diversity. Much lower percentage than the intended 100%.

To conclude, I'd add some geotargeted content as a spice, but I wouldn't hack into the core of the site by removing content, I think that's a mistake. In the Quebec example, I'd just display the banner for the best French Canadian bookie and the rest of the site would be intact. You just can't put people in drawers no matter how hard you try.

[TheGooner]

Dan,

All your points are valid ...

I agree about not customising too far on assumptions, if you are going to do language adjustments then there should be a simple over-ride with a cookie so that a customer can choose the language they actually prefer.

I also HATE the stupid mobile version assumption that many sites have when they sniff my android operating system on the 10 inch Samsung tablet. In my case it's usually wrong - I want the desktop version with all the information please. As long as there is a quick click to go to the main version (and preferably a cookie to remember that choice) then I don't mind.

But the cases you give are exceptions rather than the norm.

Eg.

Most Spanish IP addresses are used by Spanish speakers. While SOME visitors from Spain might prefer English (or Croatian), the majority will probably be more comfortable in Spanish and will be based in Spain. So my advertising will be geo-targetted containing a mix of bookies that I consider best for Spanish residents / speakers plus a couple of global top class ones.

For the Quebec example (indeed most Canadian addresses) a scattering of French and English adverts does well, or at least indicating multi-lingual advertisers.

My experience that doing basic geo-target customisation of advertising components DOES provide a significant boost to click-through numbers and registrations from that region (if I've done my job right and correctly nominated suitable bookmakers).

[sweetbet]

I've thought about about it, but I've never actually implemented a geo-targeting script for two main reasons.
(1) I'm not sure how reliable some of the scripts and plugins are.
(2) I've always felt that it is enough to display a set of flags that are linked to their respective language sections.

However, after reading the posts on this thread, I've decided to add a geo-targeting script to one of my sites, experiment with it, and see how I go.

[MichaelCorfman]

Just a few comments about the new customization features now being done on Online Casino City that I mentioned earlier in this thread based on comments and feedback above.

First, I hate the language assumptions made based on country as well. We don't set the language based on geographic location. Rather, we do it based on the browser language preference setting. You can read about this here: www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-lang-priorities.en.php. As that article notes, not all sites use language browser preferences to determine what content return. In fact, this article specifically notes that Google uses ip addresses to decide the language to use. That, in my opinion, is not an approach I personally think makes sense.

Second, with respect to currency assumptions, we don't set a default currency if the currency associated with the ip address location does not have a critical level of sites supporting the currency.

Third, we make the preference settings very clear, and they are displayed on the top left side of every page above the site navigation. We also make it very clear whenever we display lists of sites what preferences criteria were used to display the sites shown, together with a link to click to change the preferences if they do not match what the visitor wants. We've tried to make preference settings really easy and intuitive to change. Preferences are viewed and set quite often by our visitors (the preference setting page is the fifth most popular page on the site). Of course, we cookie the preference settings, so we preserve them across visits for folks who use our site on a regular basis.

Michael

[taurus king]

Have to go with geo-targeting. At least with banners...