Web Site Measurement Hacks

Track Your Geographic Visitor Distribution

Knowing where your visitors reside can help focus online and offline marketing efforts.

The Internet is great, because it completely breaks down geographic boundaries. Need information about the price of tea in China? Visit a Chinese web site to get the latest quotes! Need authentic Italian leather shoes? Visit http://www.rossetti.it for authentic Fratelli Rossetti shoes from Italy! Wherever you are in the world, you’re only a click away on the Internet.

Unfortunately, this works against marketers trying to connect more deeply with their online visitors. We live in a multichannel world—you use the Internet but you also watch local television, read magazines and newspapers, and listen to the radio—and the ideal marketing program will connect with you through as many channels as possible, thus increasing your brand awareness and likelihood to convert. Fortunately, many of the best measurement applications provide facilities to help you track the geographic distribution of your visitors.

Geographic Distribution Reports

While few vendors do quite as elaborate a job presenting the data as does Visual Sciences (Figure 5-17), geographic distribution reports are nearly ubiquitous in web measurement applications.

These reports are usually limited to the number and percentage of visitors from each locale. The granularity of information is usually country, state, and city, but some vendors offer reporting at the area code, Zip Code, and Nielsen Media Research ...