Where do our visitors come from?

Demographics is a way of identifying and grouping a broad population into smaller, more relevant, and hopefully addressable, target audiences. Profiling target audiences is 'bread and butter' marketing work; a population or audience can be grouped in any number of ways: by gender, age, education, occupation, income, political preference, language, ethnicity, etc.

Internet interactions offer a way to automatically infer some, but not all, of the traditional demographic categories. They also present some new categories and also offer the potential of responding to detailed individual preferences and establishing interactions with customers/audiences in real-time.

Internet interaction data like this can reveal where a population of visitors/customers/audiences come from. The IP address and IP routing path for a connecting session with a website (via a computer, tablet or mobile device) can be mapped in fine detail to reveal the geographical location of an originating client machine. This is possible because ISPs and intermediary routing services employ well-known internet host addresses (and assignments to their sub-nets) that map directly onto physical devices, networks and sub-networks.

The originating device (computer, tablet or mobile) will also often reveal basic configuration and preference information from the connecting software system (e.g. browser, OS, language, device type). The free availability of this information is desirable for the connecting software client/device combination as it allows both client and server to optimise data presentation and minimise internet capacity utilisation. All of this makes for new and useful demographic information. The following figures illustrate how well the location of a client device connection can be identified.

Visitor locations: San Francisco, California

In the first example specific zones in San Francisco and the surrounding Bay Area account for the bulk of the web traffic originating from California. 

The example below shows that web traffic from Ireland mainly comes from Dublin but there are also significant interactions from Limerick, Cork, Galway, Kenmare, Carlow, Kilkenny, Waterford etc. We can infer that these connections come from customers in these specific locations.

Visitor locations: Ireland

Just knowing where our visitors come from can then help focus our marketing, market analysis, sales, customer support, and other activities.