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Understanding the power of IP Geolocation solutions to manage your business risks, licensing compliance and consumer Geo marketing strategiesAs seen in iGaming Business, September/October 2007 According to Webster’s Dictionary, the word "GEO" was first introduced in popular English literature, sometime before 1776 to define Geography, Geophysics and Geology. Today “Geo” has taken on an entirely larger meaning in the online world and is being used as a prefix for our most common industry words including consumer, location, blocking, marketing, compliance, payments, mapping and risk. Indeed an entire Geo industry has emerged based on the web geography technology, generally referred to as “Geolocation”, that determines the real-time geographic location of a company’s online visitors. Having this data on hand changes the very nature of the Internet and its use in that visitors no longer need be anonymous. Companies can immediately identify where they are coming from. This very valuable information is power, but in order to be understood, it needs to have a practical business framework around it. So I’ve outlined the most effective uses for Geolocation services and how they can help your business. Geo Blocking -- more than just a consumer blocking service? There has been a lot of discussion recently about ‘blocking online consumers’ to comply with the UIGEA and newly minted Turkish legislation, however, the reality is there are many countries in the world where online fraud and counterfeiting is excessively high and you’d also want to include those countries in your risk management blocking profile (Taiwan, Nigeria and other African nations, for example). Blocking IP addresses from high card fraud countries not only improves the quality of your consumer transactions (and lowers your risk to payment fraud), but also complies with VISA Best Business Practices, and your Acquiring bank will thank you!
Geoblocking also needs to be considered from a regulatory and compliance perspective by acquiring banks and jurisdictional Licensing Authorities who are required to ensure that their clients are in fact complying with the local licensing laws. There are 76 jurisdictions offering some form of online gaming license and it is imperative that gaming operators demonstrate compliance with the local licensing regulations. We’ve recently been advised that the Alderney Gaming Commission is one of the first to impose restrictions on Licensees with respect to prohibiting US consumer traffic. You may no longer be able to secure an Alderney Gaming License unless you can demonstrate full compliance with this latest requirement. First Atlantic Commerce’s cGate®Locate Geolocation service enables a Licensing Authority to have access to their portfolio of Licensees to monitor and track consumer access to the web sites they regulate. This allows the Regulatory Authority to monitor compliance with the Licensing provisions by consolidating their entire client portfolio IP data into user-friendly electronic reports. Data can be exported to database applications for more thorough analysis of traffic patterns. Another great use of Geoblocking is to prevent site abusers from entering your web site from known IP addresses associated with home and work ISPs. Site abusers can be chargeback offenders, content/blog abusers, spammers, collusion offenders or chronic complainers to your support teams. Geo marketing – the greatest thing since sliced bread? Geo marketing provides companies with the ability to create marketing and advertising campaigns tailored to certain locations or regions. Having the ability to push content advertising to a captive consumer audience can be very lucrative for online businesses. As well, Geo marketing strategies can ensure that businesses are not violating any restricted advertising legislation in certain countries by providing them with the ability to push online ads to friendly consumer countries, and avoid online advertising entirely for restricted ones. In terms of appealing to your global visitors, web site customization is critical. And Geolocation provides you with the data you need to identify your consumers and adapt your website accordingly. Simple customization to your website includes changing language to match the IP address of the inbound request, presenting the local credit card currency for payment or funding, as well as pushing online ads targeted at consumer markets based on IP address country/city location, and ensures that your visiting consumers identify with your web pages and product offerings. Simple things go a long way in impressing a consumer, and letting them know they are important to your business is critical to marketing success. From an executive perspective, I am always struggling to determine ROI on our marketing dollars spent and Geomarketing has been a godsend. I can quickly see, for example, whether an ad or press release has made an impact in a consumer market by the number of hits to our web site from consumers in that market. I can also confirm which web site content pages have been reviewed and for how long – and more importantly which content pages haven’t been reviewed. We also use the solution in conjunction with search engine optimization strategies to better determine the success of our Google search engine click-through rates. This is a far more efficient method to determine if we are successfully reaching target consumers with our advertising, then traditional marketing ROI services like surveys or manual follow up. FAC’s Geomarketing service includes an interactive mapping function, which can map IP addresses based on specific user-defined search requests. For example, clients can map the number of hits to a specific site based on a time window or a specific geography, which provides less-technical executives with a great visual reference versus pages of IP data reports. Individual IP hits can be mapped and colour coded for specialized marketing and business analysis. And any number of campaigns can be tailored and shown on the map to provide a truly global view of company marketing and advertising initiatives. GeoRisk Data Monitoring – can it protect your bottom line? Identifying the geographic location of your customers not only allows you to block restricted and high card fraud nations; you can also block habitual chargeback offenders from your site. PSP’s that receive electronic chargeback files can match the original transaction IP data to the chargeback, which can then be mapped, reviewed and the consumer blocked to prevent subsequent chargeback abuse patterns. FAC even supports IP mapping to track 3-D® Secure authentication requests and declined transactions (by Reason Code) for consumer and Geolocation risk profiling. This is an important tool for data risk management and FAC offers IP Geolocation solutions in conjunction with other risk management solutions like $0 AVS, where the zip data entered by the consumer is matched to the zip returned from the IP Geolocation check. To simplify, if a consumer enters a billing zip code from California, yet their IP zip code data reflects New York, this is an obvious “red flag” and the transaction should be queued for review or rejected. Cross referencing consumer IP address to the credit card BIN number is also another way of tracking your risk for online fraud. If a consumer IP address originates from Taiwan yet the card BIN range is from the USA, this is a suspected fraud transaction by the consumer and should be blocked. Identifying player collusion is a seemingly difficult thing to do, but once they are suspected you can block them from further activity at your gaming site. Blocking collusive players by IP address can hopefully derail their fraud attempts at your site and inconvenience them to the point they leave your site alone. You can also map their geography to determine which countries your collusive players are located in. cGate® Locate – Connect and Get Started I have been asked many times why the FAC IP Geolocation service is different from other competitors and the simple answer is because FAC can offer the service in a simple “pay as you go” model, in conjunction with (or independent from) other consumer pre-authentication solutions like 3D Secure, $0 AVS, CVV2 matching - to provide a complete and comprehensive view of consumer risk activity from start to finish. We also offer the service as a turn-key “connect and get started” Geomarketing service independent of payment processing so you can focus on your marketing strategies and not on implementation of complicated IP Geolocation software. This will improve your bottom line by providing you with quick and accessible consumer risk and marketing data for better decision modeling and making. Andrea Wilson CEO First Atlantic Commerce For more information, please visit www.firstatlanticcommerce.com
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