We are obviously interested in who visited our website. Unfortunately, most visitors are anonymous. In most cases, the only information we can obtain is their IP addresses, such as 171.67.215.200. But what does these numbers tell us?
The IP address tells us a lot of information about the visitor. For example, we can find out the visitor’s city and approximate zip code. Sometimes we can even find the organization (institutes or companies). Let’s use a tool we developed to decipher the IP address.
First, we go to https://www.biz-genius.com/tools/ip-locator/
Then enter 171.67.215.200 and click button “Locate it”. The result is shown below:
We can see that the tool tells us that the visitor is from Stanford University, California, United States. We unfortunately do not know who, but it is already a lot of useful information. Below are a few ways to utilize the information:
- Plot a visitor map. This map will give you an idea where your visitor come from. In some cases, you can also use the map to show off the popularity of your products.
- Find out the performance of a marketing activity. For example, if you did a tradeshow in Stanford, then you can find out how many people from Stanford visited your website on that day. The same method also applies to online marketing activities.
- Guess the identity of the visitors. In special cases you can guess the identity of the visitors. For example, if the visitor is from company A and city B, then you can look up LinkedIn and find who might be visiting your site.
- Connect other information. For a given customer, if you want to find out which marketing campaign brought him to your website, you can trace back using the IP address and his location.