IP Targeting The Ultimate Guide To Advanced Optimization

Running offers is tough…

What makes it even worse is when a large percentage of the traffic you're buying, will never convert on your offer.

Unless of course, you have your own IP lists which will allow you to IP target.

What am I talking about?

In this guide, I'll teach you one of the most underutilized forms of targeting in our space today.

In fact, so few of your competition is currently doing it, it'll literally be a game changer for your campaigns.

WARNING: IP addresses are confusing as hell but I'll do my best to break it down for you.

What You'll Learn:

  • What is an IP Address
  • Which offers IP targeting should be used
  • Different types of formatting
  • Creating whitelists & blacklists
  • IP Targeting Traffic Sources

What Is An IP Address

An "IP Address" stands for "Internet Protocol".

The address is a "unique" number that is linked to all online activity.

I put unique in quotes because things get complicated FAST.

For example in the US most cellphone users will have a unique IP address, as long as they're on their cellar network

However, in most cases, your cell phone and a computer will have the same if they're both on WIFI.

When you're on a home network with a router, you have an internal IP address which is controlled by your router (the real reason you need a router).

These internal IP addresses will usually be something like 192.168.1.1.

Example:
Computer 1: 192.168.1.2
Computer 2: 192.168.1.3
Smartphone: 192.168.1.4

No matter how many devices you have on the same router, they will all have the same public IP. (Unless you specifically have more than 1 public IP from your ISP, unlikely unless you're a business)

Example:
Computer 1: 72.12.12.12
Computer 2: 72.12.12.12
Smartphone: 72.12.12.12

Class IP Address Subnet Mask Class A 0 – 126 255.0.0.0 Class B 128 – 191 255.255.0.0 Class C 192 – 223 255.255.255.0 Class D 224 – 239 N/A Class E 240 – 255 N/A *127.0.0.0 – 127.255.255.255 is a loopback address used for testing purposes. It'll also be your "localhost" IP. ### Cell Tower IP Address

The best way to think of a cell tower is a "router" for wireless traffic.

Multiple phones can connect to the tower and all devices will be Assigned:
A) The same IP for that tower
B) A unique IP within a specific IP range

Depending on which country you're trying to buy traffic in and which specific carrier you're trying to target, this will vary.

Knowing this, however, is something that even some traffic sources aren't aware of.

What I mean by this is, they use IP frequency capping for your ads.

So if everyone on a specific tower has the same IP address and you have a 1 impression per hour frequency cap, you just killed off all the carrier traffic in that region.

Luckily, this isn't that common anymore, but it can be a huge competitive advantage on traffic sources that still use frequency capping this way.

Proxy Servers

In some parts of the world, the "internet" has to be routed through several different countries.

The main thing to be aware of is that the IP address identifies the location of the ISP or proxy server that your visitor is using and that can be anywhere up to halfway around the world from where your visitor is located.

For example, I had a Qatar campaign that I had ran for SEVERAL months, with almost NO competition.

The reason was, that on most traffic sources, the particular carrier traffic I needed, had a proxy server in Austria.

So if you targeted Qatar + Carrier, you wouldn't get all of the carrier traffic available "in that country".

However, when I noticed one of my traffic sources was converting with those specific IP addresses, I IP targeted them on my other traffic sources with no country targeting.

In my traffic stats, I had noticed that the traffic from those IP addresses was showing up as Austria and not Qatar, even though it was the proper traffic.

BOOM PROFIT. I ran that bad boy at 1200-1500% for a long ass time.

Finding Profitable IP Ranges

Now I know many of you are probably thinking. well if I can find a whitelist of IPs addresses I can make some bank!

Well not so fast….

Just like every other optimization you do on a campaign, it's important that as few of people as possible have that info.

So instead of using someone else blacklist or whitelist which is found publicly, you should really build your own.

To do this you need a few things:
1) A tracking tool which shows IP data (Almost every tracker on the market has this)
2) To be running traffic and already generating conversions (even if unprofitable)
3) An offer that relies on carrier traffic or carrier based demographics

Once you start getting traffic that is converting, you'll notice a few IP addresses that are doing well.

You'll want to pull a report of all the profitable IP addresses and save them.

"Free Way"

This will take a bit more effort than the paid solution, but with a bit of digging, you can still make it work.

Take some of the profitable IP addresses and Google them.

I searched for the IP address 197.76.191.21 and came up with this site:
https://ipinfo.io/197.76.191.21

As you can see the site gives us all the info it has in its database on the IP address.

We can see that the IP is in fact from South Africa and it's for the carrier MTN.

The most important part of info, however, is the route also known as the CIDR.

So we take the route and input it into CIDR to IP range converter.

After inputting the CIDR we now have what is called the first IP and last IP of that block.

All we have to do is combined the two like this 197.64.0.0 -197.79.255.255 and we've made a range.

We can now repeat the process for each of the converting IP addresses from our data and turn it into our very own whitelist.

Here is what our data above showed us.

Vodacom
41.13.64.0- 41.13.127.255
196.207.36.0-196.207.39.255

MTN
197.64.0.0-197.79.255.255
41.112.0.0-41.114.255.255

CellC
105.0.0.0-105.15.255.255
197.108.0.0-197.111.255.255
41.48.0.0-41.55.255.255

*** Disclaimer this data is a year old so use at your own risk. (It's also public 😉 ***

We can take those IP ranges that we created and target only the IP ranges that have already converted for us.

This is extremely powerful for a few reasons:
1) You are not relying on the traffic source to keep their carrier database updated
2) You can do "carrier targeting" on traffic sources that don't offer it by simply IP targeting

Traffic Sources That Have IP Targeting

More and more sources are releasing IP targeting every day so I'll try to keep this list updated.

If you know of a source that has IP targeting please leave it in the comments below.

Mainstream

Adult Networks

There you have it, one of the more advanced targeting options is now available to you.

Like I mentioned IP targeting mostly works for mobile content offers or certain mobile apps, but there are tons of ways to get creative with IP targeting.

A Few Random Ideas

Here are a few other examples to get your wheels turning on how to make the most of IP targeting.

Trade show Ninja

Now that we understand that specific IP addresses are often times linked to a specific location.

Think of this…

Say you are a company that is at a trade show, that has "free public WIFI".

All you would have to do is connect to the WIFI, see what the public IP address is…

Then run CPM ads on something like Go2Mobi targeting ONLY that IP address with no frequency cap.

Simply running a banner that says, "Come visit us at booth #1282".

Auto Mall

In the US at least from the places I've been. most dealerships are all in the same area called an auto mall.

If there is a cell tower that is close to the auto mall or if the dealer has public WIFI you can IP target just that area.

For Affiliates, you could use this for something like auto insurance offers etc.

Got an idea?  I'd love if you leave any IP targeting ideas you have in the comments below.