If your website often gets visitors from different locations, you might want to consider utilising an IP location database. Choosing a smart IP location database will not only improve visitor experience and strengthen their loyalty, but it might even help prevent fraud and unnecessary legal issues for your business.
What exactly is an IP location database
If you’re from Australia, you’ve probably noticed ‘.au’ whenever you visit sites like Amazon or Netflix. Now, if for some reason you were to try and visit something like Amazon.in, they would actually recommend you go back to your local page, as it would be a better, more personalized experience for you. Organisations are able to do this by making use of publicly available IP addresses. These are able to determine user locations with fairly decent accuracy with the assistance of an IP location database. These databases contain the latitude and longitude of particular IP addresses, and reveal their points of origin upto a certain degree. Though this data is by no means perfectly accurate, it allows businesses to target different groups of users and tailor the product to fit their preferences and unlike methods such as GPS, it doesn’t require any opt-in from the user.
Most IP location databases are maintained by third parties and rely either on data mining or polling users to get their information. As such, a database is only as good as the organization running it. But, provided that you’re able to find a smart IP location database to work with, it can open up some unique opportunities for your business. Capitalising on these can net a great many benefits, enabling organisations to build a lasting understanding and connection with their consumer base. In many ways a truly smart IP location database has the very real potential of shaping the way businesses operate online in the future.
Content localisation through a smart IP location database
Perhaps the most obvious opportunity that a smart IP location database can present to a business is the ability to design and present different interfaces and offerings based on user location. This works both ways as well, blocking certain users from content you don’t want them to see. For example, if you have got stores in multiple states and you’re having a sale in one of them, you probably only want users from that particular state to see the offering, right? Businesses can redirect users to landing pages that display a user’s local currency and language, and maybe even a sprinkling of local colloquialisms to grab the user’s attention.
Developing personalised user content
But there’s no reason to just stop there. A smart IP location database allows businesses to take things a step further and start delving into content personalisation. For the savvy marketer, IP addresses can reveal a lot more than just a user’s location; they can be an insight into their travel patterns and frequencies, while also revealing their connection types and preferences. This in turn can serve as a valuable source of information for designing detailed targeting plans, resulting in consumers being exposed to more personalised content (whether it be for ads, blogs, etc).
Creating a seamless user experience
Localisation in tandem with more in-depth personalisation simply leads to a better user experience overall. Users will see what they should be seeing, and the interactions they need to make with your business are made to be as convenient as possible. As such, a smart IP location database, when used effectively can act as the key to building a seamless online user experience - one of the most reliable ways to foster loyalty within your consumer base.
Achieving better legal security with a smart IP location database
As stated prior, working towards a better user experience isn’t just about what the user sees, it’s about what they don’t see as well. From your business’ perspective, it’s important to keep region-specific protocols in mind when displaying content. A smart IP location database can be a really useful tool for these situations, allowing you to observe when users from these specific regions are visiting your site. Likewise, these databases can be a useful tool to ensure that your organisation doesn’t end up facing any unnecessary legal liabilities. Licenses, for example, can be tricky in a geographical context. Your company might own the license for a specific piece of content, but it only applies for a specific geographical area - say Europe for example. So, now if a user from the US arrives upon this content, it’s paramount that they are met with a ‘this content isn’t available in your region’ message.
All in all, investing in a smart IP location database can set your business on a path to building successful customer relationships and legal security. With the many emerging capabilities of these databases, it seems almost a certainty that they will play an integral role in the future of online business strategy.
