Georiot - is it just detecting the user's country location?

Question

I'm dynamically creating links on my music site which, when clicked, check if the song is on iTunes, and if found, returns the item links for the user to choose which one they want.

Of course, I need to get them to the correct iTunes store for this to work.

I'm wondering if Georiot is just getting the country location of the visitor, and putting that country code in the first search link?

If so, would it not be more accurate for me to ask the user (just once during the session) which country their iTunes account is in if they click on a button? Otherwise, eg, a UK iTunes account holder physically on location in Australia would be taken to the Australia store instead of the UK one.

Thanks for your time and help.

Answer 1

The GeoRiot click / redirection process to send a user to the correct item in their local store via an affiliate link, at a high level, can be broken down into three steps:

1.) Identify the user. This can be as simple as geo-targeting the IP address in a http request to resolve the the country/store the user should be sent to.

2.) Translate the link. We take the original URL that was given to us, learn what we need about it then identify the best matching item in the user's local storefront. This step in the process can actually get a bit complicated (more details here - https://www.google.com/patents/US20120173692)

3.) Affiliate the link. We then forward the user onto that item with a properly formatted affiliate link.