Virtualizing Nationality, and how GeoEdge suckered me into clicking

Utilizing a network of proxy servers in more than 75 countries across the globe, Rhode Island-based company GeoEdge lets SEO and SEM managers, publishers and advertisers check how their sites and advertisements appear and perform in countries other than their own. The company gives its customers the ability to analyze Web pages from multiple locations simultaneously and track the efficacy of different advertisements, giving them the data they need to create business intelligence about their advertisements.

GeoEdge Analytics captures any ad displayed on any website, everywhere in the world. With it, publishers can enforce compliance rules in other countries, and ad networks and buyers can analyze and identify international media opportunities.

The interesting part about the service is that users can look at literally any site and analyze it. Nothing says you have to observe only your own site. For example, users could look at how the ads on every .co.uk domain appear in Brazil, and then cross-reference that information with the list of most popular domains in Brazil and create their own analysis of that topic. In this way it's also a tool for crafting competitive intelligence.

This is how GeoEdge came into my radar this week. The company published a press release comparing the international ad presence of popular tech news sites Mashable and TechCrunch. Since we are a competing news site, this equates to little more than clickbait, because it promised to give us information about our competitive standings against a couple of heavy hitters.

I won't go into the details of the press release, because really, they aren't the important thing going on here. Looking beyond the press release, I discovered that GeoEdge actually provides a pretty compelling service for advertising and SEO managers who want to make sure their international audience is getting appropriately targeted ads, and that their ad networks aren't running undesirable content to potentially valuable audiences.

And for those of us whose paychecks don't come from the advertising dollar, the service gives a look at how sites appear through local filters, and provides a way to test compliance with governmental or organizational policies in different countries.