Task: Understand domains of origin
How your visitors connect to the web determines their domain of origin. If they are connecting from work, this can be more revealing than if they are using a popular consumer-level service. The top-level domain can tell you the source country, within limits. This is only very basic information, but it can be useful.
Report: Analyze domains
Navigate to Visitor Profile > Domains Report. This report provides the list of Internet service providers (ISPs) used by visitors to your site.
Key insights
Analyzing domains in this way can help answer questions such as:
- Which ISPs are preferred by your customers, and where should you target promotional campaigns? You can refine this based on the ISP preferences of your customers.
- Which businesses/companies are visiting your site? It’s also common for the domain of a business to be listed here, and this data can be used to identify the names of companies that are visiting your site.
Code implementation and console settings
No specific implementation detail is required to track domain data. SiteCatalyst does a lookup to determine the domain associated with each visitor’s IP address.
Report: Analyze top-level domains
Navigate to Visitor Profile > Top-Level Domains Report. This report provides an overview of which country visitors come from based on the domain extension of their domain of origin.
Key insights
Analyzing top-level domains can help answer questions such as:
- Do you need a separate site for countries with the highest number of visits and conversion rate on your site? This report identifies key metrics based on the top-level domain contribution. Understanding visitors’ engagement and conversion will help you determine whether you need a separate site and experience for traffic from that country.
- Do you have many visitors from educational or not-for-profit organizations? This report can identify the .edu and .org domains from which visitors originate.
Code implementation and console settings
No specific implementation detail is required to track top-level domain data. All countries have a unique domain extension, for example, .in for India and .fr for France. The United States has additional extensions that distinguish commercial (.com), network (.net), educational (.edu), government (.gov), and organization (.org) sites.