Localisation

If you're a "pro" customer, and you need to serve multiple radio stations from a single website, you may have access to localisation functionality.

Localisation lets website visitors set a location preference, which is used to tailor the content they see, so it's relevant for their area or the specific station they listen to.

In Aiir, you have the ability to manage a single website for multiple radio stations.

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How localisation works

A website with our localisation functionality lets a person set a preference, which is then stored in a cookie in their browser.

However, this cookie isn't actually used to determine what content is shown on a page!

Consider if you shared the URL of a page with someone, and said "hey check out the competition on this page", but when they visited the page they found it to look different to you, because you'd selected a location preference but they haven't. This wouldn't be useful. The same thing applies for Google, where Google's crawling bot won't select a preference, and neither will anyone coming immediately from Google results.

The same content of a webpage has to always be reachable at a single unique URL. That's why in our system, we use a location slug prefix. This means where a page varies for different locations, or is relevant to only specific locations, links to the page should include a slug which identifies the location at the beginning of the path.

Setting up the location options

The location options can be customised by heading to the Locations section in the main menu of Aiir.

Each location can have an associated station and custom properties such as social media account URLs.

Tagging content with locations

The Localise menu in Aiir
The Localise menu which lets you select which locations the content is relevant for

The Localise menu lets you select the locations that are relevant for content. It defaults to 'Always appear' which means all visitors, regardless of their preference will see the content. You can choose multiple locations, and also 'appear if no location is set', so the content appears to visitors who are yet to set a preference.

Content with the Localise option includes:

For example, setting locations on an Ad Roadblock ensures a campaign is only visible on specific pages to people who have set a location preference, while showing other campaigns to people with other preferences, or no preference at all.

Listener club members can have a location associated with them, which is automatically added when they register, or switch locations while they're logged in.
You can then target these members by location preference using Direct Marketing audiences.

Setting location(s) on a page in Page Manager, means that the page is only accessible at URLs beginning with the selected location(s) slug.
It also ensures that the site map only contains URLs for the page with those location slugs.

Seeing localised content on your website

Pages are localised by adding an extra 'slug' at the beginning of the page's URL path.
For example, a generic morning show page might be found at:

www.stationfm.com/on-air/mornings/

But a localised version of this page for a specific city could be found at:

www.stationfm.com/london/on-air/mornings/

Prompts

If you have not yet set a location preference, but visit a page which is localised to a specific location, you may see a message at the top of the page asking if you'd like to make this location your preference.

If you have set your location preference for example to Birmingham, but you visit a page which starts /london/, you may see a message at the top of the page asking if you'd like to return to the Birmingham homepage.

Various apps in Aiir, such as the Events Calendar, have a setting to automatically prompt the user to set a location preference in order to see the content when accessed.

Linking to pages

If you link to a page which is relevant to specific locations, and you want to be relevant to the visitor's own location preference, you can 'Localise' your link by selecting the option at the bottom of the Page Finder window.

This will add  {LOC_PATH_START} to the beginning of the page's path. This placeholder won't actually appear in your page, but will be replaced with either the slug of the visitor's location preference, or just nothing if the visitor has not yet made a preference.

If you'd like to link to a localised page as part of your site navigation, go to Page Manager and for each item click the three dot menu icon and then turn on 'Add location in navigation'.

Sectionals in Template Builder versus embedded in pages

When it comes to localisation, Sectionals which are added in Template Builder work a little differently to those you drop into a page in Page Manager.

To begin to understand why, read our section on  how localisation works first.

Template Builder lets you add things to your templates, which appear across multiple pages of your website. Therefore if you add a sectional in Template Builder, it's not considered to be part of the 'content' of a page.

When you link to a page which doesn't contain localised content, there's no need to begin the link with a location slug. However if a sectional has been added to the template, and that sectional contains localised items, there would be no way for the system to tell which should appear.

It would be bad practice to add location slugs to every link on your website, just because you've got a sectional in the template which might contain localised items. That sectional isn't part of the content on any page.

Therefore, sectionals added via Template Builder will look at a person's preferred location, i.e. that stored in the cookie, rather than the location indicated in the URL.

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