As an Australian I’m always conscious of the fact that most of my traffic comes from overseas.  I run all my blogs on .com domain names and don’t cover any of my topics from a purely local perspective.

Because of this it becomes important for me to understand where in the world my visitors actually live.  There are a few simple reasons for this:

• Timing of blog posts – it makes sense to schedule blog posts for the “day time” where most of my visitors are living.
• Language – I try not to use any Australian slang or in jokes, and do my best to use the “correct english” for the bulk of my visitors (eg organisation vs organization).  I also make sure to write very clearly and use simple language so that visitors who speak english as a second language can easily understand my posts.
• Contests – whenever I’m thinking about the logistics of contests involving physical objects as prizes I want to make sure that I can actually deliver them to the part of the world where someone is statistically most likely to win.
• Monetization – I price my services in the currency of the country where most of my traffic comes from.  If you offer seminars and other in-person events you would also be interested to know if enough people live locally to attend.

There are other reasons that would apply to blogs in different niches.  For example if you blog about small business strategies you would need to consider whether your advice is correct for the countries that your readers live in.

So with all of that in mind here are three techniques you can use to determine where in the world your blog visitors are.

Google Analytics

If you have installed Google Analytics on your blog you can go into the reports and drill down to Visitors –> Map Overlay to get a nice view of where your visits are coming from.

The same map can also be used to view other traffic metrics, with sometimes interesting results (the USA sends me most of my visitors but visitors from Gabon spend the longest time on site on average).

Mailing List

I use Aweber for my mailing lists and their reporting is able to show me the locations from which subscribers are signing up.

Surveys

The next time you run a survey you could slip a question in about where your readers live in the world.  This is probably the least accurate as you would want to mainly stick to regions and not overload the question with too many specific countries as possible answers.  But if you can’t use either of the other options then this is your best alternative.

So what about you?  Do you know where your visitors are coming from, and does this impact your blogging style at all?

Image Credit: Flickr

Tagged as: Analytics, Audience, Geo-Location, Traffic