Tracking Users by Geography, State or Province

Would like to get better stats for target region

[Shane]

I would like to track more precisely the users of our site who originate from within our province/state. I have read most of this forum posts and understand the problems with AOL and WebTrends, .....

What I would like to know is do other companies load their log files into databases and run queries against them to get better stats?

For example, DNS resolution only identifies the province/state if that field is entered. But you can identify someone is from your province/state based on other information such as city name. Other examples maybe people referred from city specific sites.

Or, is there an even better solution?????

If people are using db's, what db can handle the volume and are there freeware utilities being used?

Thanks,
Shane

[Tapolyai]

I doubt you can qualify IP addresses reasonably, or people visiting city specific web site as "locals". I often look up other cities' weather, restaurants, events, etc. to help me with my business travel (and the web is darn good for this). I suspect a lot of other people do the same, so your stats would be off with the visitors instead of locals.

There is a scema using META tags, (geo.position, geo.placename, geo.region) but that would not help you with visitors only with web sites.

There are also crazy people who travel but still dial long distance to their ISP, despite the fact that the ISP has nationally distributed numbers.

There is also networldmap.com project and the geobutton.com free db.

[ralnikov]

look at www.quova.com
hmm... my second post about this firm for last 3 minutes...

[Shane]

Thanks for the suggestions. I have looked at
networldmap.com project and geobutton.com. Networld map is part what I need. It does not handle AOL though (they are a small number of our users anyway). I don't think that our management would go with Geobuttons on our page. Too bad.

www.quova.com looks interesting as well. I am checking it out.

I guess I go back to my original question. Does anyone load their log files into a db to dig for more information, such as, location? Hmmmmm, anyone care to share experiences?

Cheers,
Shane

[toadhall]

Shane,
Would a PHP solution do? If so, check your Sticky Mail.
Toad

[perch]

try 123LogAnalyzer, it has a IP mapping database.
url snipped

(edited by: mark_roach at 10:25 pm (utc) on Jan. 7, 2002)