What to do with the country map

The map is the page people look at first and use least. It is pleasant to see that somebody in Chile read the latest 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 says something about the network, not about 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.

Reading only the top row undercounts the real audience, sometimes by half. The variants have to be added together before anything is concluded.

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 one of the languages on offer is not an argument for translation. Steady traffic from visitors whose browsers ask for a language that is missing is the clearest signal there is.

2. Post when they are awake

Combine the country list with the hourly view. When a large share of the readership sits six or eight time zones away, publishing at the hour that suits the author 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 in

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 says which one. The country list is the thing that prompts the search.

Finding it early matters, because that is the window in which a reply in the thread, a word of thanks, or a follow-up post still lands while anybody is reading.

4. Make the practical decisions

For a site that sells anything: shipping options, currencies, payment methods people in that country actually use, and which legal texts are obligatory there. 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 acting 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. A pattern has to survive a few weeks before anything gets rebuilt around it.