Today, businesses are trying to do anything they can to make sure that they survive and generate revenue. One thing that has made this possible is technology. Businesses are investing in technology and implementing features that not only make their work easy but also help them remain relevant and meet their customers’ demands.
Weather targeting is one of the ways that businesses are using to market themselves today. This involves a situation where a business identifies the weather conditions of a specific location then shares content to their customers on that location based on the weather conditions.
For example, if a certain location is experiencing heavy snow, a business might use this to show their clients in that location snow coat adverts. Such adverts are most likely to sell and be relevant compared to a business that is advertising light clothes for people in such locations.
How do these businesses get the weather information? Well, one might argue that getting this information is easy since they can just visit any weather website and get the information that they want.
However, these businesses need more than just the weather conditions of a certain place. They implement meteorological data APIs to get a system that can generate alerts when the weather conditions change and provide them with weather forecasting features.
Implementing Weather Targeting with APIs
To get started, businesses need to do a number of things. Even though people move a lot, they need to pin their users to a certain location. This requires them to collect location data of their users using different methods such as tracking their cellphone numbers (this might be illegal in some countries), IP addresses, and GPS data. This will help in knowing where a certain client is before deciding which adverts to show.
After getting the location data of their clients, they will then need to pin them to a city, or a known locality. This can be done using tools such as the location lookup tool that helps in tying IP addresses to cities.
Now, the most important part comes after pinning your clients to a certain city. This involves going through a list of weather APIs, checking their documentation, and even testing them to make sure that the one that you choose meets all your requirements. Integrate the API with your ad targeting system to make sure that you get minute by minute updates about changes in weather conditions.
Having done the most important things for your advert targeting, you can now extract weather conditions of any location that you want and then use them to advertise your products. This way, you will be able to show products that customers are most likely looking for, increasing the chances of making sales.
Conclusion
Depending on the resources that a company implementing an API for their targeting has, they can choose to implement a free or paid API. However, it is important to note that even though this might depend on the requirements of the company, paid APIs offer much more information and features compared to free APIs.
They are also adequately tested, easy to use with a readily available support team to help when one is facing problems. This makes them better than the freely available APIs.