 | Tracking Web Visitors' Geographic Information |
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As more and more web sites go global it is important that they are able to display information their visitors can understand. That is where getting the visitor's geographic location comes in handy. Anybody on the globe can view your web site and in order for you to truely become a global web site you have to cater to more customers in countries other than your own. That is why it is important that you know your users and know where they are coming from so that you can appeal to them in their own language, culture, etc. Without knowing where your customers are coming from you can't know for sure that they are being displayed information about your products that they can read. In fact, one way of increasing sales is to know your customer and how to market to them and by knowing where you customer's are located you can potentially increase your sales in that part of the globe.
Each time a user visits your web site, their internet address or IP address is tracked. Whenever a user anywhere connects to the Internet they are assigned an IP address by their internet service provider (ISP). This IP address is a number tells other computers on the internet how to route data to you. The service provider has the ability to assign users IP addresses because they themselves have been assigned a range of IP addresses that they can use by certain regional organizations.
For instance, MSN might be assigned all IP addresses in the range of A to B. Using IP addresses in this range, MSN will then assign each one of their internet subscribers one of the IP addresses between A and B once they connect to the internet. MSN and other such internet service providers are assigned IP addresses by 1 of 4 global organizations that delegate IP address ranges.
The 4 IP address delegating organizations and the regions that they delegate IP addresses in are as follows:
ARIN - North America, Caribbean, & sub-equatorial Africa
RIPE - Europe, Middle East, Central Asia, & Africa north of the equator
APNIC - Asia Pacific
LACNIC - Latin America & Caribbean
Basically each one of these orginizations delegates IP addresses to providers located in specific regions across the globe and those providers then delegate those IP address however they see fit. Resolving a IP address to a country is difficult because you have to constantly update which IP addresses ranges are assigned to which countries. To make it more difficult, services providers will often assign a subset of their IP ranges to servers that are not even in the same country as they are. Therefore, with all these IP address range assignments happening it is important to keep a large list of which IP ranges are assigned to which countries. There are companies the internet that sell only databases with these IP ranges and their associated country. The problem with this is that the IP range assignments change often and it will continuely cost you to keep your database updated.
There are multiple applications for the use of geographic information on a web server. Geographic information would be useful for:
- For redirecting users to geographic specific web pages
- Hiding certain information based upon the visitor's country
- Diplaying country specific information such as language, currency, etc.
- Auto-filling of form fields for country
- Credit card fraud detection
- Displaying statistics to advertisers
With any location identification web server utility the advantages really boil down to how much money it will make you and in some instances how much easier it will makes things for you.
To save money and make purchase orders more secure a customer's location can assure you that the credit card purchase is a valid purchase order and that the cardholder is is making the purchase from the country they live in. Verification of location to credit card country is very important because it protects corporatation agianst fraud.
Now to make things easier for you and your customers it is best to ensure that they have an enjoyable experience on your web site because this could potential translate into more revenue that is generated from your web site. Therefore it is imperiative that the people that come to your web site can actually read what is on it. With the user's location you can detect where they are located and display your web site in a different language to them. Chinese visitors for instance could be instantly redirected to a page that features content that would cateria to Chinese people. Users would also have an enjoyable experience if they had to fill out less information on your website. This makes it easiler for them to make purchases and having their location already filled out in the form and having their form specific to their country makes it less of a hassle for users who want to make purchases on your web site.
Another advantage of a user's location can be in the fact that you can display to them whatever you deem worthy to display to them. If you don't want visitors from a certain country viewing your web site you can hide it from there view. This gives you more control over who can view your web site. This is very important exspecially for web sites where there is sensitive information on there and you don't want users in certain countries viewing it. You therefore not only have more control over your web site in general but you also have more control over who is viewing your web site.
Generating statistics for advertisers can be difficult and costly. But by detecting which country users are from you can easily find out what country your advertiser's will be selling there product. This can be extremely helpful because advertisers want to know that they are advertising to the right people and with statistical information of which countries are viewing your web site the most they can feel more assured that they are advertising to the right people.
The most important reason to get the user's information is to upgrade your site from a local web site to a global web site. Companies that are thinking about going global need to take in mind all of the users that you are now selling to. It is true that everybody in the world could view your web site before, but now you are targeting not only people in your own country but also people in other countries around the world.
An effective implementation of retrieval of visitors' geographic information is implerative because it can make or break the usablity of the information that you are retrieving. All implementations use a database to store which IP ranges are from which countries. Each program that gets a user's country information then has to retrieve it from the database by searching it. How the programs retrieve that data and gives web masters access and the ability to use it is the most important feature of any of these geo-programs. Using a program that could slow down your web server just to look up an entry in a database can actually hurt the a user's experience on your web site and this could result in a slowing of sales. Therefore an effective database setup and database searching routine is very important. Also the way any program gives you the ability to use information about the user's country is of also a factor when deciding which program to use. Having a program that is suppose to give you access to a web visitor's country location but not being able to actually use it in the server-side scripting language of your choice can cost you money and man hours exspecially if you have to go and change the rest of your site to use the right server-side scripting langauge.
Because of these and other problems that we've found in other programs we decided to make CountryLocator which is an ISAPI. One of the best things about CountryLocator is that it is an ISAPI filter, which means that country information is loaded and retrieved extremely fast without using very many system resources. It has a large advantage over other technologies which might use SQL and can be slower and much more difficult to setup. CountryLocator uses HTTP headers to transfer information to server-side scripts it can not only be used by PHP but also by ASP, CGI, and any other scripting language that can retrieve HTTP headers. CountryLocator allows it so that you don't have to worry about which country is assigned which IP address because CountryLocator does it all for you. It also updates itself frequently to make sure that it has the most recent list of IP range to country assignments and the best part is that these updates are FREE! This ensures that you will always get the most accurate result when getting a user's country location. In fact, CountryLocator is able to resolve each user's IP address and determine their corresponding country location with an estimated 95% accuracy rate given that it is a bit difficult to measure. CountryLocator gives you access to a web visitor's country location fast, efficently, and accurately.
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