IP geolocation is no longer a foreign concept to many organizations but some may still be wondering if it is indeed useful when making important business decisions. For instance, they may not know how IP geolocation data can help with brand protection. First thing first though, let’s start by defining what IP geolocation data is.
What Is IP Geolocation Data?
IP geolocation data lets users identify the origin of website visitors, customers, employees, or anyone who’s accessing or communicating with their network. Typical IP geolocation solutions (application programming interfaces [APIs], lookup tools, bulk IP tools, or databases) provide an IP address owner’s country, region, city, latitude and longitude coordinates, time zone, GeoNamesID, Autonomous System (AS) number and details (name, route, and domain), Internet service provider (ISP), and connection type. All this information identifies where the device (computer or mobile device) is physically located at the time its owner visited your site, purchased a product on your e-commerce platform, accessed a file on your network, and more.
Given all that, IP geolocation data is handy for various applications including cybersecurity, marketing, and fraud prevention. Find out how specifically in the following sections.
3 Ways IP Geolocation Data Can Provide Insights
As mentioned above, IP geolocation data is helpful in at least three business processes, making it good to have if your company wants to protect your brand. With it, you can enhance your cybersecurity posture, improve marketing results, and reduce fraud.
Identify Potential Threat Vectors
Pinpointing threat hotspots is one of the many ways organizations can mitigate cyber attacks. You can use publicly accessible reports as a guide for prioritizing IP addresses that could pose more risk than others. To mitigate phishing, which remains one of the biggest problems for many companies, several reports can serve as a reference on where to start cyberdefense efforts.
Proofpoint’s 2020 State of the Phish report, for instance, indicates that email remains the top phishing entry point, putting the number of phishing emails at 15 million. Pairing that knowledge with the Spamhaus Project’s daily list of top 10 worst spam countries should give an idea of which IP addresses you should prioritize analyzing and blocking (should they prove malicious) if hundreds or thousands pass through your network daily. Knowing that a majority of harmful spam comes from the U.S., for instance, looking at IP geolocation data could be a sound idea.
One way to successfully protect your brand is to avoid succumbing to a cyber attack. And close monitoring and consequent blocking or malicious IP addresses from known threat hotspots is a means to go about that.
Focus on the Right Targets
When it comes to marketing, knowing your target demographic is key. No matter how good your product or service is, if you don’t sell it to the right people, then all your marketing efforts could go to waste.
After identifying your target demographic, you need to know where they reside. The approach lets you hone in on places where they gain the most profit. It also allows them to know where they’re not doing so well so they can rethink their strategies. And pinpointing what countries, regions, or cities they should concentrate on is doable with the aid of IP geolocation.
You can collect users’ IP addresses from network logs (focusing on those coming from your shopping pages) to determine what countries a majority of your buyers are from. Once you’ve identified your best sales areas, you can customize your website content for them, make more discounts and offers available to them, and so on.
Another way to protect your brand is to ensure your business keeps growing. And you can do that by focusing on the right markets with a little help from IP geolocation.
Ward Off Fraudsters
Stolen credit cards are sold at very cheap prices on the Dark Web. At the start of August 2021, for example, around 1 million stolen credit cards with matching expiration dates, CVV numbers, owners’ names, and other personal information were posted for sale on an up-and-coming stolen credit card dump site. The sad thing is that people actually buy and use them, putting not only their owners at risk but also the companies that get tricked into approving purchases made with them.
Should the real card owners contest the purchases and prove they didn’t make them, the sellers would have no choice but to revert the charges made. Doing that, of course, translates to lost revenue and additional costs to pay the card owners back.
Once in combination with other data sources, fraud is preventable with the help of IP geolocation data. Adding another verification layer, such as comparing the card user’s IP address at the time the transaction was made with his/her address on record, could help companies avoid the perils that fraudsters pose. If a card holder who resides in the U.S. and only makes local purchases, for example, suddenly buys something from China-based IP address 115[.]159[.]34[.]108, a confirmation call before approving the transaction may be required.
To protect your brand, you need to protect your customers from fraud. Only if they’re satisfied with the security that you provide can you keep them coming back for more.
If your organization is out to protect your brand, you need to do at least three things—identify potential threat vectors and stay well away from them, focus on the right targets to ensure growth and success, and ward off fraudsters to keep your reputation intact. You may need a little boost like having the right tools at your disposal, including a good source of IP geolocation data, threat reports from reputable companies, and well-parsed internal databases.
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