How to use geographical data to grow your website

The map is the page people look at first and use least. It is pleasant to see that somebody in Chile read your post, and then the tab gets closed and nothing follows from it. This article is about what actually follows from it.

What the counter knows, and how well

Two separate things, and they are easy to confuse:

• Country and city, worked out from the network address at the moment of the request.
• Browser language, which is what the visitor's browser announces it prefers.

Across all counters on this site that comes to 200 countries and about 4,400 cities. It is a lot of detail, and it deserves rather more doubt than it usually gets.

Read it with the right amount of doubt

Address-based location tells you about the network, not the person. A visitor on a VPN appears wherever the exit is. Mobile traffic often resolves to a national gateway hundreds of kilometres from the actual handset, which is why the city list for phone-heavy sites tends to pile up in one or two places. Corporate traffic comes out at head office.

Country is reasonably reliable. City is a good deal weaker, and on a small site it is frequently one person and their provider rather than a place worth reasoning about.

The language trap

This one catches nearly everybody. Browsers do not report a language, they report a language tag, and the same language arrives under several of them. In the data on this site, pl-pl and pl are separate rows. So are en-us, en-gb and plain en — three rows for one language.

If you read only the top row you will undercount your own audience, sometimes by half. Add the variants together before you conclude anything.

The second half of the trap: language is not country. A reader in Germany whose browser says en-us is not a German-speaking reader, and translating a page into German will not reach them. Always look at both lists, never at one.

Four things worth doing with it

1. Decide what to translate — and what not to

Put the country list beside the language list. Steady traffic from a country whose visitors already browse in a language you publish in is not an argument for translation. Steady traffic from visitors whose browsers ask for a language you do not publish in is the clearest signal you will get.

2. Post when they are awake

Combine the country list with the hourly view. If a large share of your readers sit six or eight time zones away, then publishing at the hour that suits you means arriving in their night, and the first hours of a post — the ones that decide whether it gets shared — are spent on an empty room.

3. Notice when somebody links to you

This is the most useful of the four and the most often missed. A country that has been flat for months and jumps in a single day is almost never a trend. It is one link: a forum, a link aggregator, a local news site, somebody's newsletter. The referrer list will tell you which one. The country list is what tells you to go and look.

Finding it early matters, because that is the window in which you can still reply in the thread, thank the person, or write the follow-up while anybody is still reading.

4. Make the practical decisions

If you sell anything: shipping options, currencies, payment methods people in that country actually use, and which legal texts you are obliged to carry. All of that follows from where visitors are, and guessing is expensive in a way that checking is not.

The visible side

Flag counters put the same data on the page itself, where visitors can see where the other visitors came from. That is decoration rather than analysis, and it works as decoration — a long row of flags says people come here from everywhere faster than a sentence would. The thinking still happens on the statistics page.

One caution before you act on any of it

All of this is aggregate. On a site with thirty visitors a day, one city is one person, and a country that doubled went from two to four. Small numbers move for no reason at all, and the temptation to explain them is strong. Wait for the pattern to survive a few weeks before you rebuild anything around it.