IP Geolocation API: Better Understand Website Visitors
Where are your website users coming from? That’s a common question that many website owners don’t always know the answer to. Understanding where users come from—and information about their location—can be important to the functionality of your website.
Just think, you could push notifications at time zone appropriate times, or adjust language, design, or layout based on the location of a website visit.
Geolocation data can help you create a more valuable experience for website visitors. And the free IP Geolocation API is a tool that can help. Here’s a look at it and how it works.
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What is IP Geolocation?
IP Geolocation is the identification or a close estimation of the location of a computer on the internet. Geolocation can help you determine more than just location when it comes to user engagement.
Information provided by the IP Geolocation API includes the continent, country code and international prefix (for phone dialing), location or country name, languages spoken in that place, latitude and longitude, and even the currency code.
This information can be practical in a number of ways. Most commonly it is used to help customize or personalize a website experience for users around the globe. But it can also:
- Provide information in the correct language
- Provide pricing using the proper currency
- Send information at the appropriate time
- Adjust content to the user’s location, such as mapping
The nice thing about this tool is that the tool can geolocate without providing an IP, locating a user on the front-end without detecting the actual IP address. (This is an excellent choice due to privacy settings and considerations.)
The product was created by apilayer, a software company based in the United Kingdom and Austria. apilayer is the company behind popular API and SaaS products worldwide, including the mailboxlayer and currencylayer APIs, invoicely and eversign.
Who Should Use It?
The IP Geolocation API has a practical application for a lot of different websites. It’s accessible to website owners and companies of any size because it is free and open source.
Use this tool to:
- Personalize content and group users by location so that they get content just for them with specialized campaigns.
- Ensure that users get the right version of a multi-language website.
- Automatically detect currency type so online shoppers aren’t intimidated by complicated conversions.
- Make tap-to-dial more intuitive with phone prefix detection.
- Better display information, calendars and forms by detecting a user’s time zone.
How It Works
GET https://api.ipgeolocationapi.com/geolocate/ HTTP/1.1
What’s great about the IP Geolocation API is that it is an API-based tool. Most users can deploy the sleek JSON and XML API design and get running in under 10 minutes.
There’s plenty of documentation to help you get all the code in place and customize your IP address data needs. Plus, the tool is from a company that has been collecting data for a long time and has a solid relationship with service providers to ensure that IP data is accurate so users will get exactly the experience they expect.
Country information packaged as convenient JSON objects. It includes data from ISO 3166 for countries and states/subdivisions, ISO 4217 for currency and E.164 for phone numbers. Data is updated monthly via MaxMind geolite2 database so you know your location information is accurate.
Pricing
It’s free to use. IP Geolocation API is a free real-time IP to Geolocation JSON API with detailed countries data integration. All you really need to use it is a developer who can get the code snippets installed and running on your website.
A self-hosting option is also available. You can learn more about that here. (Look for the deploy to Heroku button.)
Conclusion
If you want to provide customized website experiences for users in different places, IP Geolocation API is an excellent tool. It’s free and open source, so there’s no reason not to try it out. And there’s plenty of information to help you get started. Learn more and try it today.
Our thanks to IP Geolocation API for sponsoring this post, and helping to support Design Shack.