IP to geolocation doesn’t just give you data related to the location of your site visitors. Instead, it’s a way to provide a personalized user experience and improve your conversion rates and business revenue. One of the best ways to get accurate IP to geolocation data is to use a reliable IP to geolocation API like ipstack.
Based on an IP address IP to geolocation APIs give you the location of a device that your site visitors are using to access your website. The API can identify the location of any electronic device, like a smartphone or laptop. It then provides location data points that can include continent, country, region, city, latitude, and longitude. Some APIs also return additional useful data points. These can be postal codes, time zones, or even the currency of a particular location.
In this article, we’ll give you some useful tips for doing IP to geolocation and getting the most out of your data. But first, let’s discuss why you need IP to geolocation data.
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Why do you need IP to geolocation data?
IP to geolocation data gives you the ability to customize your website content for visitors from a specific continent, county, or city. You can also use this data to display different product offers for customers from different countries or cities. Finally, you can redirect users to pages translated into their language to deliver relevant content.
IP to geolocation data also helps improve your marketing — you can use it for targeted and location-specific advertising. It also helps you provide a better consumer experience.
Another great benefit of IP to geolocation data is fraud prevention. When you know the actual location of your customers, you can compare it with the billing address they provided to see if both addresses match.
Tips for doing IP to geolocation
1. How can I check the accuracy and coverage of the IP to geolocation API?
The accuracy and coverage of an IP geolocation API are the two most important features that you need to evaluate. This is because not all APIs provide accurate location data. Similarly, different APIs have different coverage capacities. This means you can’t expect every API to give you the location data of every visitor from any part of the world. Finally, inaccurate data can lead to poor decision-making.
Different APIs have different data accuracy because they use different data sources to collect IP to geolocation data. Some only use Regional Internet Registries or RIRs data. Other APIs also use data provided by ISPs and geolocation of browsers along with RIRs data to improve the accuracy. Most APIs will give you 95% accurate country data. Unfortunately, they aren’t as accurate when it comes to the city or regional data, especially when your site visitor is not located in a big city or metropolitan area.
However, there are APIs out there that you can trust to get the most accurate location data, be it country, city, or region. One such API is ipstack which uses rock-solid data sources, such as large ISPs, to deliver precise data, including country, city, region, latitude, longitude, and more.
When it comes to coverage capacity, ipstack offers both IPv4 and IPv6 data and covers more than 2 million unique locations in over 200000 cities around the world. This means the API is capable of providing the location data of almost any user/website visitor.
2. Should I always check an IP address for threats and risks?
Accessing threats and risks originating from a specific IP address is important so they don’t harm your website or web app. ipstack offers a security module for Professional Plus users that detects proxies and crawlers. This helps you identify potential threats to your website posed by particular IP addresses. Once you have identified the threat, you can take timely action to protect your website or web application.
3. Can I make things easy with bulk IP lookup?
Sometimes you need to get the geolocation data for a number of IP addresses, and making API requests for every IP address individually can be time-consuming. This is where the Bulk IP lookup feature comes in handy. With ipstack’s Bulk IP Lookup feature, you request data for as many as 50 IPv4 or IPv6 addresses simultaneously.
However, the API response for bulk IP address queries contains IP data of one object per requested IP address. So, if you want more than one object, you can always use the standard lookup.
4. Should I make use of the currency module to deliver a better customer experience?
The currency module is another super helpful feature offered by ipstack. With this feature, you instantly get accurate currency information. This includes the currency code, name, and symbol used in the IP address location returned. You can then use this data to provide a tailored shopping experience to your customers by displaying prices in their local currencies. This will result in a better customer experience and better revenue.
5. How can I use the time zone module to optimize your campaigns?
Knowing the time zone of your website visitors and customers is important for optimizing your campaigns. For example, say you want to send a promotional email to customers at 2 PM. 2 PM in the USA is not the same for your customers in Australia or the UK. There can even be different time zones even within a country. For example, there are nine different time zones in the USA.
Using time zone information, you can also display events, like sale start and end times, in your visitor’s local time. This also enhances the customer experience. Time zone information is also helpful for displaying timestamps in the user’s local time in the chat section on your website.
Many websites ask users to fill out forms to find their time zone, but with ipstack, you automatically get the time zone information of your website visitors through their IP. ipstack returns data points, such as current time, GMT offset, and code.
