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.

Ensuring a fast, responsive web site for your visitors is one of the best – and often least expensive – ways to improve the ROI of a web presence.  There is no sense in releasing something out onto the Internet if all your visitors are going to leave early, and miss the message out of sheer frustration, boredom, or a poor overall experience.  On the web you typically have mere seconds to make people happy.

Unfortunately this important component of any good web optimization strategy can get overlooked in the mix of web development, online marketing, web analytics, and SEO programs.  As with most things in life, striking the right balance for your web site visitors is the key, though with the right tools and measurements in hand it does not have to be a painful experience.

Here are a couple of methods to help you judge the speed of your own website from a visitor’s point of view:

1.  Speed testing your web pages.

There are plenty of web page speed analyzers online, though your mileage with these can vary depending on the location of the test server (no sense using an Australian server if most of your clients are from Texas), and the competency of the developer who launched them.  I’ve had pretty good luck with Web Page Analyzer by WebSiteOpimization.com.  Their President wrote the book on Website Optimization (literally, it’s published by O’Reilly), so he knows a thing or two about website performance.  I have also used Pingdom’s free Tools For Webmasters which gives a nice visual report and a little more functionality.

Another useful tool is the Firefox plugin YSlow from the Yahoo! Developer Network.  It analyzes web pages, grades them by performance, and makes multiple suggestion on how to increase performance.  This plugin requires the Firefox Firebug web development plugin as well, so make sure you have it installed as well (first).  YSlow takes its grading criteria from the Yahoo! Developer Network article “Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Web Site“, which is excellent reading for the technically inclined.

2.  Load Testing / Stress Testing your site.

If you have a large website, or a corporate site that can expect to get bursts of simultaneous visitors, you will probably want to invest in load performance testing, or stress testing.  There are a number of companies that offer load testing services of various sizes and strengths – including Webperformance and Load Impact.  There are software-based solutions available for this as well like the free Microsoft Web Application Stress Tool and the more complicated Apache JMeter, but they are, generally speaking, best left to the professionals who know what they are doing.

An important note:  NEVER stress test a live site without the knowledge and agreement of the webmaster and the web analyst.  And NEVER NEVER run one of these tests against a shared hosting solution unless you want to make your web hosting provider very angry.  Load testing can bring a web server to its knees, so it’s important to know how to fix this before you start.

3.  Determine your vistors’ connection speeds.

Most web analytics packages, including Google Analytics can give you some idea as to the connection speeds of your visitors.  You’ll want to be careful with this, however, because it’s typically a the solution’s best guess using a combination of testing methods, with “unknown” typically being the largest single group.  Still it’s a useful measurement to consider because if you’re about to roll out a fancy new media-rich web site, and 25% of your visitors are on some form of dialup connection (or even slower DSL connections, these days), you risk losing them due to reduced performance.

Hopefully this post will get you started in evaluating, or at least thinking about the speed of your own web site from your visitor’s point of view.  A couple of the topics are a little on the advanced side, so feel free to contact me (via email or through the comments) if you have any questions, further advice,  and/or experience with similar speed testing solutions.