Website Statistics Report: Visitor Location by Country
Overview
This website statistics report shows the total sessions and pages requests for each country where somebody has made a visit to your website. This is shown in both a table and also a graph which is shown in the example graph below:
Using the country names listed in the table you can drill further into the detail for each country where the visitors are listed against the city they are from. This is in-fact the “Visitors by Country & City” report and this is effectively a shortcut to it as it allows you to go straight to a particular country.
You take a higher view of this by looking at the “Visitor World Map” which shows visitors locations on a world map, or the “Visitors by World Region” report which groups Countries into World regions.
This report is useful for seeing which countries are interested in your website and can sometimes reveal some surprising trends. For example the graph shown earlier is from the statistics for a golf club in England, who seemed to be attracting particular interest from Croatia. Rather to the surprise of the club owners who were unaware of this potential market. Using this information they organised a successful advertising campaign in Croatian golf publications and now have a number of visiting Croatian Golf Societies. Of course the next step for them is to develop a Croatian language section of their site. Once they have done this they can check back to this report, and using the date filter, see if it has improved traffic from this region.
By checking this report for your website often you may be able to spot and act upon similar trends.
A note about visitor location data
The Geographical location data for your website visitors is worked out using the Visitors IP address. Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately depending on your view, when the Internet was designed there were no hard and fast rules created for determining to 100% accuracy what a users geographical location is. Since then techniques have been developed to extract this information, one of which we are using. However there is no method that is 100% reliable and so any company or software that claims it can extract this information to 100% reliability should be viewed with suspicion. The method we use gives results to around 90% to 95% accuracy level, and this is about as good as it gets using any technique.
Therefore you may occasionally get the odd spurious piece of data in this and any of the visitor location reports, and so is worth bearing this in mind when using this data.
We are happy to answer any questions you may have about this so please feel free to contact us via your supplier or the Help & Community, Support link.
Report Options
As with most reports you can choose the date range that this report runs. There is also a printer friendly version which is available by clicking the icon in the top right of the report.
How this Report Works with the Log
Log size is very important to this report as each log record represents the data for one session. If your log is full you will be losing the oldest record with each new visitor so increase the log size to store more data and analyse trends further back in time.
If you are performing optimisations to your website that are aimed at increasing the average return count make sure you have enough log space to store both historical data and sufficient new data to put your optimisations to the test.
To understand how to get best use of this report read
Managing Website Session Log help document.
Optimising your site for this Report
This report requires no special treatment to get the best out of it other than the standard bullet points of …
- Ensure that the tracking code is placed on every page of your site
- Ensure that your log is as big as possible.
- Use this report in conjunction with the Referrers Report to build up a picture of where visitors to your site come from.