Tutorial Discussion - Effective Geotargeting with PHP

[Ducani]

This thread is for all comments related to the tutorial
Effective Geotargeting with PHP

[ryanhellyer]

This seems like a very effective technique for targeting particular markets.

I've been considering using this technique for the ice hockey site in my signature. It would make sense for that site to have a more prominent section for foreigners about coming here to New Zealand to play hockey. However this would be totally irrelevant for anyone already in New Zealand. So setting up slightly different content for the two countries would be quite sensible.

Many of our best players come from overseas (particularly Canada) so targeting other countries with information about why and how they should come to our country/city to play would be quite useful.


Thanks for the lesson on how to set it up

[Draicone]

Hey Ryan,

Glad you enjoyed it Give me a shout if you need a hand with it, I'd be happy to help.

-Akash

[ryanhellyer]

Thanks Akash.

Your tutorial covers everything quite well though, so I should be able to nut it out quite easily.


I find the following quite fascinating ...

script takes on average 0.05 seconds to execute .... an entire script to generate a database-driven page takes 0.01 seconds on the same server.

That's a really useful thing to know, as I often assume basic, small scripts like that won't suck up too much resources, but obviously this is not the case here.

[duellevel]

Good tutorial, thanks Draicone

[Draicone]

Originally Posted by ryanhellyer

That's a really useful thing to know, as I often assume basic, small scripts like that won't suck up too much resources, but obviously this is not the case here.

It's interesting looking through execution times for different scripts and servers. The length of the script isn't so much important as the complexity.

For example, there are some very bloated CMSs out there that take 10 seconds to generate a page, whereas a simple CMS like SilverStripe takes 0.01 seconds. Still, SilverStripe has a lot of code powering it, especially a lot of HTML.

This script isn't as small as it seems though - I don't show you the massive IP database that comes with it It has thousands of records that this small script sifts through to match the location of the current user.

[Lamer980]

Well my site gets around 20,000 page views per day and so far today it has gotten over 10,000 according to Google AdSense and I'm not seeing any problems.

Although the data table has some 150,000 rows, whomever created the original record search routine was sharp enough to use a bisection search, which allows the script to only look at a tiny fraction of the actual records.

Think of it this way, the script takes the middle record of the dataset and decides if the IP address is higher or lower than that record. If it is lower then it takes the record at the halfway point of the lower sub-set of records and again makes this determination. This continues until it gets to the correct record. This is one of the most efficient methods finding a matching record and allows the script to only need to every look at a very small fraction of the total records.

Here is what practically happens on a dataset of 100,000 records:
Check #1) 50,000 records eliminated. 50% remaining
Check #2) 25,000 records eliminated. 25% remaining
Check #3) 12,500 records eliminated. 12.5% remaining
Check #4) 6,250 records eliminated. 6.25% remaining
Check #5) 3,125 records eliminated. 3.13% remaining
Check #6) 1,562 records eliminated. 1.56% remaining
Check #7) 781 records eliminated. 0.78% remaining
Check #8) 390 records eliminated. 0.39% remaining
Check #9) 195 records eliminated. 0.20% remaining
Check #10) 98 records eliminated. 0.10% remaining
Check #11) 49 records eliminated. 0.05% remaining
Check #12) 24 records eliminated. 0.02% remaining
Check #13) 12 records eliminated. 0.01% remaining
Check #14) 6 records eliminated. 0.006% remaining
Check #15) 3 records eliminated. 0.003% remaining
Check #16) 2 records eliminated. 0.002% remaining
Check #17) 1 recored eliminated match made.

As you can see it is very very efficient.