OK, so I tried this out today to see if it works.
Basically what I wanted to do was to show different banners to the US, Canada, and the UK.
I decided on 3 casinos:
1. Go Casino for US viewers
2. UK Casino Club for UK viewers
3. Golden Reef Casino for Canadian viewers
The Go Casino banner was already available there, of course, but I needed to add the UK Casino Club and Golden Reef banners. This was easy to do -- just click on "External Media" and then fill out the forms. The only thing here is that you can't "upload" a banner, but you can paste in the URL of where the banner is located -- i.e. either on your own server or on some other affiliate program's server. Enter the destination URL (affiliate link), select the proper banner size (in my case, 468x60), and then off you go.
Once the external banners are in the system, go back to the "Rotataions" area and set up a rotation. This is where you can decide which banners will be shown to which countries.
There are some other features here as well, which I didn't play with, but they look sort of interesting. For example, you can decide to show certain banners for a specific length of time, which might be useful if you're using a "seasonal" banner (such as a Halloween promo) or maybe a banner with a bonus that expires on November 30, for example.
Anyway -- for my test, the only thing I set was the country at the bottom of the list. For the Go Casino banner, I made sure that "USA" was the only country listed in the Selected Countries box, since I only wanted US visitors to see the Go Casino banner. For UK Casino Club, "United Kingdom" was the country I chose, and for Golden Reef, "Canada" was the country.
Once this was all set up, I copied and pasted the PHP code that was created for me. There are two options at this point -- PHP if your host supports PHP, and Javascript if your host doesn't have PHP. Since I have PHP, I used the PHP code.
I pasted the PHP code onto the homepage of
New Online Slots.
I then viewed the site through several web proxies (found at proxy.org) to see which banner was being displayed in Canada, the UK, and the US.
It worked like I thought it would.
US viewers see the Go Casino banner; Canadian viewers see the Golden Reef banner, and UK viewers see the UK Casino Club banner.
So, if you have a banner-heavy site or forum, and if you have any international visitors at all, this could be a good, relatively easy way to laser-target your banners. Show banners with € symbols to European countries, show £ banners to the UK, $ banners to Canada and the US (if that casino accepts US players)... you get the idea.
And what I set up wasn't actually a "rotation" either... I just used it for geotargeting. The tool also keeps track of clickthroughs for you, so if you're showing 2 banners to the US, for example, you'll be able to tell which banner gets more clicks. If one has a CTR of 20% while the other has a CTR of 1%, then you keep the 20% CTR banner and swap out the 1% banner for something else.
One thing that almost tripped me up, though, was that I needed a Casino Blasters member ID to finish creating the banner rotation. I had an ID from years ago that worked, so this was easy to solve... However, I don't really plan on working with Casino Blasters again any time soon, so this was kind of a strange thing to have to deal with. If you have a BCP account but don't have a Blasters account, I'm not sure if you'll be able to get past this step or not. Hopefully BCP will just delete this step so that a Blasters ID isn't necessary.
Other than that, no complaints.... Nice of BCP to make a useful tool like this available to their affs for free.
