GeoRouter's Origin

GeoRouter is a new service developed by Ionisis. It answers the issue of "how do i detect my website visitor's geographic location, and redirect them accordingly?". This is most commonly an affiliate marketer's issue, as often times an affiliate marketer will pay for traffic that originates from a specific geographic location to be directed toward an offer that is only valid for that geographic location. Often times they'll find that they get traffic that is not from that country, so the traffic is wasted. In order to recoup some of that investment, it would be great if you could detect the geographic location of that visitor, and redirect them accordingly to an offer that is valid for that location. This is where GeoRouter comes in.

How GeoRouter works

GeoRouter allows you to create rulesets that consist of a URL and a country location. Any one of your rulesets can be designated as your default. The default URL rule is what will be applied to website visitors who come from a country that does not match any of your given URL rules.

After you create your ruleset, you click the "Get Code" link. Your code snippet will never change, so changing your ruleset will not require that you need to update your code. There are different types of code snippets designed to work with your server setup and experience level.

GeoRouter's javascript code will work regardless of your server setup, but requires that the website visitor's web browser has javascript installed and enabled, which is almost always the case. It is best to put this in your HTML file's HEAD section, for the page that the visitor will land on. The javascript code will redirect the website visitor to the Ionisis GeoRouter service, which will then break up the relevant pieces of information about the visitor that are needed to determine the geographic location of the visitor. Then it will find a rule from your account that applies to that visitor's geographic location, and redirect them accordingly. This all happens very quickly, without the user being aware that they are momentarily redirected to Ionisis.

If you are a more advanced user, and you are able to use server side scripting, GeoRouter offers 2 pieces of PHP code for you to choose from. The smaller code snippet is the simplest to install, and can be placed anywhere within the page, so long as you understand when and where to put pieces of code that send headers. Typically, the page with the GeoRouter code will be an empty landing page, so this will be the only piece of code in the page. This piece of code does exactly the same thing that the javascript does, except that it does not require that the website visitor's browser has anything installed or enabled.

The larger piece of PHP code is almost the same thing, except that it will not redirect the visitor to Ionisis at all, and will gather the necessary pieces of information itself, and send it to Ionisis and wait for a response, in the form of a URL, which it will use to redirect the visitor. Because this piece of code creates much less of a server load on the Ionisis servers, it costs slightly less to use.