How can I tell if my website visitors are in my service area?

For most retailers and small businesses all they are interested in is their local targeted audience. People visiting their website from outside their service area are not really important to them. So how can a business tell where their website audience is coming from? First off, people using high speed Internet access almost always leave what we call a foot print. With Google Analytics we can use this foot print to determine the approximate region/city the website visitors are accessing the Internet from. This is close enough for us to use to learn about our website traffics' general location.

With Google Analytics whether we are looking at our "direct traffic", "referrer traffic", or "search engine traffic" we can include in the report listing the region or city the visitors access the Internet from. In some cases this will be off because of their Internet Service Provider (ISP), but generally it will really help us understand if the majority of our audience is within our selling area. See how to select the region/city below:

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Note: In Google Analytics you can also select the "Service Provider". In some cases the web visitor is coming from a company with their own static IP address and you will see the actual company name by selecting the Service Provider.

So how can we use this information? For example, if your retail business is in New Jersey and you see in Google Analytics the majority of your daily audience is not coming from New Jersey then you need to make some website search engine optimization adjustments. Remember, just because you get a lot of visitors doesn't mean they will turn into sales leads, especially if they are not in your service area.

Below is a screenshot of a few of MarketingYourStore.com's "referring" website visitors including the City they accessed the Internet from...

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