- Task: Define KPIs
- Task: Understand visits
- Task: Understand unique visitors trends
- Task: Understand where to focus your marketing efforts
- Task: Understand visitor demographics
- Task: Understand domains of origin
- Conclusion
- Review questions
- Review answers
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Task: Understand where to focus your marketing efforts
Now you have an understanding of how many visitors come to the site and how many visits that adds up to. But, how about where those visitors come from? That would be interesting to know so you can target marketing efforts in specific geographical locations where you want to expand your business.
Internet service providers (ISPs) in each market area supply the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) with the IP addresses they use. Adobe partners with Digital Envoy to provide a geographical tracking tool based on IP addresses. Digital Envoy uses that data to map the IP address of each visitor with the geographic city, state, zip code, and designated marketing area (DMA). Audited independently by Keynote Systems, Inc., Digital Envoy data offers over 99 percent accuracy at the country level, 97 percent accuracy at the region level, and 90 percent accuracy at the city level.
Report: Analyze country, region, city, state, or DMA of visit origin
We’ll discuss this suite of reports on geographical locations together, since they’re very similar, but each uses a specific granularity of geographical area.
Navigate to Visitor Profile > Geosegmentation > Countries Report. This report focuses on identifying which country the visit originated in.
Navigate to Visitor Profile > Geosegmentation > Regions Report. This report focuses on identifying which region, or area within a country, the visit originated in. The region drills down on the country you selected in the Visitor Profile > Geosegmentation > Country Report.
Navigate to Visitor Profile > Geosegmentation > Cities Report. This report focuses on identifying which city the visit originated in. The city drills down on the region/ states you selected in the Visitor Profile > Geosegmentation > Regions/US States Report.
Navigate to Visitor Profile > Geosegmentation > US States Report. This report focuses on identifying which US state the visit originated in.
Navigate to Visitor Profile > Geosegmentation > US DMA Report. This report focuses on identifying which US Designated Marketing Area (DMA) the visit originated in.
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Key insights
Reviewing reports that analyze the area of origin for visitors to your site—whichever type of area you choose—can help answer questions such as:
- Which geographical area contributes the most daily unique visitors for pages tracked in this report suite? Each SiteCatalyst report in this suite shows you the geographical area (country/region/city/state/DMA) from which the visit originated. In addition to the standard “Ranked” and “Trended” views, the “Map” view color-codes the area according to their relative contribution to your total traffic based on the intensity of the color. The intensity of the color increases with the number of daily unique visitors.
- Which geographical area contributes most to the conversion? Assuming you’ve written these variables to a custom conversion variable, you can segment the conversions by geographical locations to determine which area has the highest conversion.
Interpretation of report data
In interpreting the data with respect to geosegmentation of visitors to your site, it’s important to remember the following:
- Corporate proxy servers mask the IP address of the visitors accessing the site, so all visits originating from the proxy server are treated as a visitor from the same country, thus underreporting that data.
- Mobile IP targeting varies from provider to provider.
- The IP addresses of visitors who use satellite Internet service providers (ISPs) are masked.
- Military and government IPs record the IP of the home location, not the military base where they are stationed.
- AOL users originally showed up as “McLean, Virginia,” no matter where the visitor was located. To overcome that, SiteCatalyst now buckets all AOL users into the AOL US segment.
Code implementation and console settings
No specific implementation detail is required to track geosegmentation data. It’s automatically tracked using each visitor’s IP address.
Consider using a visitor identification, segmentation, and transformation architecture (VISTA) rule to automatically replicate the geographical data in five custom conversion variables. This will help you segment the conversions by geographical locations.
Report: Analyze preferred time zones
Navigate to Visitor Profile > Time Zones Report. The browser’s time zone is based on the visitor’s operating system time zone. SiteCatalyst uses that information to determine the visitor’s time zone.
To optimize your channel spend based on geotargeting, determine which time zone visits are high at what time of day. You can tailor your content to the specific time zones that generate most of your traffic.
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Key insights
Analyzing your visitors’ preferred time zones can help answer questions such as:
- At what time should you run a geotargeted campaign? For example, you might have visitors in geographical areas that include the Pacific time zone and the Eastern time zone.
- When are visitors most likely to convert into customers? This report indicates which time zones your visitors are coming from. All time zones are present in Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), which is the international time standard. If you evaluate the conversions, you can also identify the times when your visitors are more likely to convert.
Code implementation and console settings
No specific implementation detail is required to track time zone data. It’s automatically tracked using default information from the browser.