Use Cases for Location Data

When building a website, the location of your users might not always be the first thing that you consider, but it is something that can have a big impact on your website and business results. There are many reasons to care about where your visitors come from. For example, if you have an offline business, the proximity of your physical stores to your visitors is important. Alternatively, online stores need to consider things like warehouse locations, shipping and international taxes. Additionally, all website owners should consider their loading speed which can vary depending on how close your servers are to your visitors. Below are a few more ways you may be able to utilise location analytics data based on your circumstance.

Physical Stores

If you have physical stores then it can be useful to look at your website trends in the area where your stores are based to gather local intelligence. Below is an example of a few questions you might be able to answer from your analytics data:

  • Are lots of people in your store’s location searching your website for something that you don’t stock? If so then it may make sense to start stocking that item.
  • Are people making searches at a specific time?
  • Does the location of your website visitors coincide with your in-store demographics or could there be an opportunity to expand your audience by selling online?

Ecommerce

If you are an ecommerce store there are other questions that your analytics might be able to answer.

  • Are the locations where customers are ordering from close to your existing delivery warehouse? If you are an ecommerce store, you can look at where your customers are ordering from to decide on the best locations to open a new warehouse for delivering to your customers.
  • Hosting your website in servers near your users can have a small impact on the speed of your site, you can use your analytics to identify where the majority of your customers are and set up your servers in that country. Or, if your visitors are geographically diverse, you could opt to set up a CDN with multiple edge locations serving content in your most popular countries and cities.
  • If you can only serve customers in specific regions then you may consider ignoring visits from outside that region when conducting market research on your website audience through the use of segmentation.
  • You can correlate your online data with your in-store data to see if spikes in traffic coincide with increased footfall in your store.

Market Research

Seasonality

Understanding the seasonal context of your users is important. For example, if you sell outdoor products which are popular in summer but the majority of your customers are in Australia then you will want to make sure your marketing focus is from December to February even if you’re currently wrapped up somewhere cold in the northern hemisphere.

Another consideration is that countries often celebrate different public holidays from each other and these can have a big impact on how customers shop. For example, spiritual events like Diwali, Ramadan, and Christmas and traditional shopping events like Black Friday after Thanksgiving in the United States.

Identify Translation Opportunities

You may notice that you get a large number of visitors from a certain country but you also have higher bounce rates from these countries. If people within that country often speak another language than the one that your site is published in, then it may be worth investing in translations to better serve these users.

Improve Your Offline Marketing

You can also use location data within your analytics to inform offline marketing decisions and measure web interest in relation to offline campaigns. While offline marketing campaigns aren’t as inherently trackable as online campaigns, that doesn’t mean their impact can’t be measured. For example, if you launch an ambient media campaign targeting billboards and transport systems in a certain area, you can measure your levels of traffic from that area, over similar timeframes before and after the campaign is launched so see if you receive an uplift.