One of the biggest challenges businesses face is identifying how to increase revenue. Creating great content and better UX is the key to success, but understanding how your user lives is something that will help you retain them. Unfortunately, companies usually rely on outdated methods to try and accomplish this goal. We know location intelligence and tools are inevitable in today’s business world, but many companies skip these powerful software and hardware solutions to maintain their bottom line. However, if you want to leap past your competition and become a frontrunner in your industry, it’s time to stop relying on the past and start embracing tomorrow.
The ability to map an IP address to GPS coordinates is crucial since it can perform many tasks, including locating websites (for search engines), ensuring the proper delivery of emails, or showing Facebook Ads where your Instagram posts are coming from so they can target ads towards you.
When it comes to extracting data from IP addresses, there is a new way to do it. Instead of the old technique of finding an IP address and manually tracking down the GPS coordinates, you can plug in an IP address into an API, which will give you the exact GPS coordinates for the provided address.
Example: An engineer from Erie, Pennsylvania is writing an application to find the locations of photos taken in his hometown. Approximately half of the photos with locations have GPS coordinates in the EXIF data and another 29% have IP addresses. This engineer can use a third party IP Geolocation API to obtain GPS coordinates for the remaining 73% in under a minute!
So, what can you use to fulfill this task?
ipXapi
ipXapi is a robust and user-friendly geolocation IP address identification tool. It is a free website monitoring tool that supports JSON, PHP, and Python.
Thanks to its database and API, this service provides extremely accurate IP statistics. It’s connected to a number of well-known Internet service providers (ISPs), who offer regular updates on new and existing IP ranges. The API’s database is constantly updated, with up to 24 database updates per day, because this platform is connected to a variety of channels that provide real-time IP data.
It also supports more than 2 million unique locations in more than 200.000 cities throughout the world. Its connectivity and security features are also really accurate, and they will substantially help your website.
How does it work?
After scanning the IP address, the API returns location-related data as well as information about the currency you’re using. It does, however, provide information about the time zone, as well as information about the connection and internet provider, as well as security information.
The following is the response:
{
"status": "success",
"country": "Argentina",
"countryCode": "AR",
"region": "B",
"regionName": "Buenos Aires",
"city": "Lanus",
"zip": "1824",
"lat": -34.7198,
"lon": -58.4089,
"timezone": "America/Argentina/Buenos_Aires",
"isp": "Telefonica de Argentina",
"org": "Telefonica de Argentina",
"as": "AS22927 Telefonica de Argentina",
"query": "190.49.8.189",
"areaCode": "",
"dmaCode": "",
"inEU": 0,
"euVATrate": false,
"continentCode": "SA",
"continentName": "South America",
"locationAccuracyRadius": "1000",
"currencyCode": "ARS",
"currencySymbol": "$",
"currencySymbol_UTF8": "$",
"currencyConverter": 101.0585,
"flag": "",
"callingCode": "54",
"languageCode": null,
"security": {
"is_proxy": false,
"proxy_type": null,
"is_crawler": false,
"crawler_name": null,
"crawler_type": null,
"is_tor": false,
"threat_level": "low",
"threat_types": null
},
"connection": {
"asn": 22927,
"isp": "Telefonica De Argentina"
},
"type": "ipv4"
}
Also published on Medium.