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As our search engine rankings have climbed, so has the amount of non-US traffic we receive. While we appeal to a worldwide audience, it's really just the US traffic that can be best monetized. Without giving away numbers, I really feel I need to do something drastic, and asap, to increase the percentage of US visitors. Any ideas?

I know Google Webmaster Tools has the ability to specify a geolocation to target traffic to, but we're a worldwide audience, and so it would be silly to be giving up free traffic for no reason.

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A middle path exists between preserving a global community and making the site attractive to US advertisers. has already explained the business need, and and are right to flag community value and SEO benefits of global traffic. The practical approach is to keep the main site global while creating clear, measurable US-focused signals and minimizing non-US costs.

Create a US-facing surface (subdomain or subdirectory such as site.com/us) with a modest amount of tailored content and an advertiser-facing media kit that shows US-only metrics (3-month rolling sessions, unique users, top pages). Use hreflang/en-US or regional variants for those pages so search engines understand the intent; see Google Search Central on localized versions for implementation details (About hreflang and localized URLs). Run a small, inexpensive paid acquisition test (PPC or social geo-targeted traffic) to lift and stabilize the US percentage until advertisers take interest.

Reduce bandwidth cost from non-monetized traffic with a CDN and caching, which lowers origin costs and preserves global access; Cloudflare and similar CDNs explain this benefit (What is a CDN?). For monetization, layer demand: prioritize US buyers via direct deals or programmatic line items and fall back to global networks for other geos. Finally, be transparent with the community: keep forums and major features global while using targeted pages and ad strategies to fund the site.

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Member Avatar for efmesch

Dear Queen Dani,
As a non-US registered visitor of DaniWeb, I feel a bit offended by your desire to prefer your US audience to the rest of the world. True, you are located in the US, but there are computer mavens all around the world who contribute greatly to all facets of your wonderful site. It would be a loss for DaniWeb's universal appeal if we "outsiders" were to be relegated to a posiion of second rate, not so desirable participants.

Member Avatar for mrandrei

Non-US traffic is still beneficial to a site's popularity. In fact, it's one of the factors why a site gets better ranking. The more traffic you get from all over the world, the better.

Member Avatar for Dani

Dear Queen Dani,
As a non-US registered visitor of DaniWeb, I feel a bit offended by your desire to prefer your US audience to the rest of the world. True, you are located in the US, but there are computer mavens all around the world who contribute greatly to all facets of your wonderful site. It would be a loss for DaniWeb's universal appeal if we "outsiders" were to be relegated to a posiion of second rate, not so desirable participants.

I think that you misunderstood what I am saying. Of course I value our non-US audience. Your contributions are just as appreciated, and I certainly don't value you as second-class members. In fact, the majority of our moderation team is from outside the US.

However, that being said, strictly from an Internet marketing perspective, DaniWeb is my fulltime job and I earn a living by selling advertising space on the site. However, most advertisers (and nearly all ad agencies here in the US) only want to deal with US traffic (and sometimes UK / Canadian). Therefore, there's a majority of my traffic that consumes the majority of my bandwidth and high server costs, and yet I am unable to monetize at all. The smaller percentage of US traffic needs to be able to pay for everyone, so to speak.

Therefore, I started this thread to ask the question of ... how is it possible to meld the two worlds? I don't want to cut-off non-US visitors as they're equally valuable in terms of the community. But, from a business perspective, ad agencies like to see a majority percentage of the traffic as being US-based (it's all a numbers game). Therefore, the question I'm asking is how do I find a middle ground and how do other website owners handle this situation?

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