If you don't monetize your site or advertising for foreign visitors, you're leaving lots of euros, pounds and shekels on the table.

With hundreds of ad networks available, publishers of all sizes are attempting to maximize their traffic. In doing so, their greatest challenge becomes monetizing those site visitors. But many are forgetting a large percentage of their visitors that come from north, south, east and west of the borders. Are you monetizing your visitors from outside of the United States?

Although the internet is driven by many American companies and websites, increasingly, more and more visitors are coming from beyond our borders and from non-English speaking countries.

Today, more than 45 percent of the visitors to leading social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace and hi5 come from non-U.S. visitors, representing a large increase when compared to the foreign visitors just one year ago.

And this trend isn't only among social networking websites.

Research from comScore indicates that 63 percent of the visitors to Ticketmaster come from outside of the United States, as do 64 percent of the visitors to New York Times Digital, 68 percent of the visitors to Disney Online and Expedia. More than 80 percent of the visitors to CNET Networks and Apple Computer, Inc. come from outside of the United States as well.

So how can you take advantage of all of these foreign visitors?

Publishers
Not monetizing international traffic is like leaving money on the table.

The key to monetize international traffic is to do so at the local level. Rather than try to market to these foreign visitors with American ads, American publishers should partner with their international affiliates or other local market agents in order to sell this traffic in the market in which the visitors originate. These local market representatives better understand how to create campaigns to target these foreign visitors, and would probably pay more for this traffic to include these visitors as part of their other advertising campaigns.

At Oridian, we partner with leading international websites, enabling our advertisers to benefit from opportunities from American websites internationally. For example, a Scandinavian distributor of an international athletic shoes manufacturer was looking to promote gift shopping leading up to Christmas. Because of the young demographic sought, we ran a campaign on a leading American social networking website, geo-targeting the advertising to Scandinavian IP addresses -- and delivering 8 million impressions.

Today, online technology and advertising targeting has advanced to the point at which marketers can create and run different advertising campaigns with different ads for French-speaking Canadians, Belgians and Swiss. Furthermore, foreign advertisers will pay you more for your ads due to the relatively weak dollar versus most foreign currencies.

In the monetization of international traffic, size doesn't matter. Many small and medium-sized publishers can command an effective CPM that is greater than what many American publishers will pay for their traffic.

Advertisers
In Millard Brown's international ranking of the top 100 brands, four of the top five and eight of the top 10 international brands are American. This creates an opportunity for these American brands to advertise to international customers. What is more logical than to market these brands than on a U.S. website?

That is exactly what we did for a top-10 internationally ranked U.S. brand looking to increase sales among water sports enthusiasts in a Mediterranean country. We planned an advertising campaign on a range of U.S. websites that were geo-targeted as well as being contextually and behaviorally relevant to the target audience for the U.S. brand in the Mediterranean market where the campaign ran.

The challenge for advertisers is to maintain the consistency of the brand values throughout the markets, and determine who will own the brand marketing -- U.S. corporate or the local market? Of course, these are issues that all international marketers must determine.

From my experience, media tactics are usually managed by the local country managers with most of our clients, while brand strategy is usually defined by corporate headquarters. The stronger and more regarded the brand is, the greater the likelihood that corporate headquarters has defined the brand/creative strategy.

Even the issue of determining whether the international visitor is a foreign native or an international expatriate can be determined with the click of a button during the user's first visit.

As publishers look to optimize their websites, and advertisers attempt to maximize their ROI, let's not forget to look at all of the foreign visitors that are frequenting our websites and interacting with our brands. The money and opportunities are ours for the taking.

Jacob Nizri is president, Ybrant Digital Networks and chief executive officer, Oridian, an international advertising network with local sales houses and site-specific representation.