Determining Visitors County of origin

how do i do it?

[Equiano]

I would like to be able to determine the countries where my users originate from.

Specifically what options are there for me to determine user country of origin in real time, i.e. as they hit my website, so I can return content specific to that region.

Secondly from my logs, Is the analysis of IP addresses the best way to determine user country of origin. If so how do people handle ISPs like AOL, aren't all their users issued with IP Addresses from Virginia? So how would one split US AOL users from UK AOL users?

Thanks in advance.....

[perch]

I heard that GeoIP can do this job.

[Shane]

Splitting AOL users up is (or at least was when I looked at it a year ago) next to impossible.

There are a couple, well, at least two, companies that will identify the user for you. One is Geo... and I can not recall the name of the other. If you do a search on this site there are more than one thread which deal with this topic.

One cavet, none of these solutions is one hundred percent. When I last discussed it people always raised the "But I travel to country x from country y and dial-up my ISP in country x and I'm not really there." This is probably the least of your worries given AOL, ..... Also there are ISPs which span across country boundaries and they will give you problems as well.

Regards,
Shane