IP Geolocation is the extrapolation of physical location information as well as other identifying data just from the IP address that a person uses to surf the internet. Many websites today use geolocation to better serve their visitors with relevant information like localized news and promotions. Below are some examples of excellent applications that are being powered by IP address geolocation technology.

Digital Rights Management

Due to restrictive licensing agreements, movies and music streaming services restrict viewers from other countries from accessing their contents. Even if you are a paying subscriber, as long as your IP address is located in a foreign country, you won’t be able to access your streams as part of digital rights management.

Export Compliance

Most countries have their own export restrictions as part of their own local laws. American retailers are subjected to export restrictions by the US government. Fraud prevention service provider FraudLabs Pro has a feature to detect the customer’s IP address country and blocks any transactions if the country is in the embargoed countries’ list which is maintained by the US State Department.

Content Localization

With so much content from around the world, it makes sense that you would want to know local information that is relevant to you. News aggregator services will often show you the news that are from around your region which gives you the news that matter to you.

Price Optimization

Online services or retailers may display different prices based on IP address location. Complying with local legislation with regards to such services may incur additional taxes or caching data in a local data center may cost more than usual. Therefore, to maintain price margins, providers may resort to pricing optimization based on viewers’ countries.

Geo Advertising

Many online advertising providers implement geo advertising and this has helped boost click-rates for advertisements. Viewers are served advertisements that are more likely to be of interest to them as the advertisements will be localized to the viewers’ region. Geolocation improves the advertisers’ ROI.

Traffic Management

Internet users are a fickle lot and being made to wait for a slow website to load will just drive them to another website. This is why Content Delivery Networks (CDN) are being recommended for big websites that serve large numbers of users. Behind the scenes at the CDN, your IP address provides the geolocation they need to find the nearest server to serve your browsing needs which means you wait for less and surf more.

Traffic Analytics

Website traffic analytics tools have made life a lot easier for the marketing folks as a host of data is available to determine the demographics of visitors to a website. Among them are the countries of the visitors which come in handy to adjust marketing strategy when targeting a specific country for your marketing campaign.

Fraud Detection

Any online retailer will usually have to deal with its fair share of fraudulent transactions. This makes fraud screening essential to reduce chargebacks. The FraudLabs Pro fraud prevention service includes rules to detect when the customer’s IP geolocation is too far away from the billing address. This usually is a sign of fraud as the fraudster will ship products to their own location while using the credit card details of someone who may be living elsewhere.

Security Protection

Webmasters may want to block visitors for certain countries from visiting their websites or attacking their servers. IP2Location.com has a firewall export tool where webmasters can generate the firewall blocking scripts for those countries. Supported firewall scripts include Apache .htaccess, Linux iptables, IIS web.config and Cisco ACL.

Try out the free firewall export tool.

Law Enforcement

P2P networks have always been misused by those who share copyrighted digital materials like movies and songs. According to news, various legal companies have been hired by the entertainment industry to harvest the IP addresses of those actively sharing such materials for legal action. Identification of the abusers can be easily obtained via geolocation along with ISP cooperation.

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