I was looking up the contact information for an international advertising and marketing firm this morning (that shall go unnamed), and after drilling down through the various region, country, and city options of their “Contact Us” web application, it occurred to me that not enough companies are using geographical IP databases to help their visitors find locally relevant information.  Sure, their little geographical office-finder map looked great, but wouldn’t it be much more effective to figure out where I am based on my IP address, and present me with the coordinates of the closest local office, and then present me with the cool office locator in case I was looking for an office elsewhere?  It would certainly be more impressive from a marketing perspective.

Geographical IP databases are very powerful tools for any web marketing or e-commerce initiative, and extremely cost effective given the flexibility and breadth of the services they provide.  Beyond website customization, they can be used to help avoid credit card fraud by identifying high risk countries, to distribute regionally-relevant ads and marketing material, and even (more controversially) disallow network connections from specific geographic regions.

One solution in this area is MaxMind’s GeoIP offerings.  They offer several different pricing options based on the level of accuracy your project requires.  Their database is available by country (US$50), region (US$150), and city ($370) – all products have additional monthly charges for updates (see their web site).  In addition, Maxmind has offerings that can identify the originating organization, ISP, netspeed, etc.  Maxmind also offers less accurate free offerings so the web team can play with the databases and then update them to the commercial versions in the future.  Just be aware that these free versions are subject to open source GPL/LGPL licensing and thus may not be appropriate in a corporate environment.

Another option in geographical IP solutions is IP2Location.  Their solutions start as low as US$50/year for a country-specific database and includes free monthly updates of the informations, or US$199/year for the city level of accuracy.  And if you really want to go crazy with geographic data you can subscribe to the $1399/year service which includes country, region, city, latitude, longitude, zip code (US), time zone, ISP, domain, area code, and weather!

There are ways to get around geographic IP databases, so I wouldn’t advise using it as the sole form of security for anything regionally sensitive – though both companies have made great strides in detecting proxy servers used to get trick these databases –  but being able to serve out locally relevant content in this manner is an incredibly powerful tool.

For the web team, implementing solutions based on geographical IP databases are fairly straight forward.  In the case of the office location function I identified at the beginning of this post, a simple script that checked the incoming IP address against the database and served the appropriate page would have been enough.  They could even have simply imported the appropriate parts of the database (which comes as a large CSV file) into their own SQL server database, and run the check against it to speed things up – with a “catch all” page for regions not serviced by a specific office.

If you have any experience using geographical IP databases in new or innovative ways, I’d be interesting in hearing about it.  Also, if you have a project that might benefit from this sort of technology, feel free to comment or contact me directly.