How does geolocation

How can someone determine your general area or city in an instant with only your IP address? This amazing feat is accomplished by geolocation software. Like something from a sci-fi movie, geolocation services can zero in on your country, state, city, and finally your postal code. What is geolocation? With an IP address, the following information can be collected: - Country - Province or state - Longitude and latitude - City - Time zone - ZIP code - Issuing Authority Almost anyone, whether businesses or individuals can obtain paid geolocation services using a subscription service.

Although there are free geolocation service providers, the paid services offer more accurate results. These are official and large organizations that are responsible for distributing and managing IP addresses in specific areas around the world. This is only a starting point.

Geolocation services are capable of zeroing in on your location by relying on other sources to find your IP address. The method is similar to a gold digger mining for gold and other precious metals. Geolocation service will excavate data by tunneling through the information until they meet their objective; your location. The primary source for IP address data is the regional Internet registries which allocate and distribute IP addresses amongst organizations located in their respective service regions:.

As I understand it, IP subnets are assigned to the providers upstream of your service providers - each IP range is therefore flagged as being within the country of origin of that provider, so each IP within that range is assumed to be within that country. This is not foolproof - we previously had satellite broadband provided to us in the UK by a Belgian provider. Each time we googled anything, we'd be offered to see only pages within Belgium.

These organizations maintain master lists of allocated IP address blocks and where they are allocated to, and publish updated lists frequently. Geolocation software takes full advantage of these lists and provides quick methods of mapping IP addresses to countries. Generally commercial products will strive for more accuracy and utilize other data sources as well.

Check out the Geolocation Software article on wikipedia for some interesting links on the topic. There's in the internet infrastructure something called an Autonomous System, defintion here. Each provider has been assigned at least one of these. These are assigned to providers, which off course have a location, so the routing protocols know by the ASN what zone they're in.

For a quick start into geolocation, open a command line and enter tracert stackoverflow. Mostly, the first few lines already give away important hints about your location. Basically they guess based on the IP address. If you want somtjhing that's cheap and mostly works and aren't worried about alienating your users it;s a good solution. But this is also the reason why IP location is so useful. Once they connect to your site you already know their IP address, so just by using the Users Insights Geolocation module, you can find their location.

IP-based geolocation is the most used technique for tracking the user locations for a reason. Hence, IP-based geolocation works very well for analytics-type analysis, as you can reliably collect a lot of data. It can also be used for user interface customization but it has its limitations due to its nature.

Your customers can see what stock is available in their country as well as the prices of your goods in their preferred country. It creates a seamless and tailored shopping experience that will keep eyeballs on your site. Geolocation is also a powerful way to improve your marketing. From there, you can use location-based filters to drill down into cities and view the statistics for acquisition, behaviour and conversions for each destination. With this information, you can start to analyze your base and begin to make better business decisions.

While IP-based geolocation is a treasure trove of information for businesses, users might feel less inclined to share their data with you.

Another way that your geolocation data can become corrupted is with data injection. This is when the user sends fake locations or when no data is collected because it requires the user to consent. So if you need the exact address of your customer, down to their house number, the best way to collect this data is the old fashion way: simply asking for it. Geolocation is an excellent way to grow your business and offer your customers a tailored experience. Your email address will not be published.

I'm Jake, the author. I'm a London native and a content writer for Storemapper. Try our store locator app on your site and help customers find your products.