Audience location — country, city, and what to ship there

If you're shipping physical product, hosting events, or making location-aware decisions about anything — what time to post, what language to localise, what tour route to plan — you need to know where your audience actually is. Not where Spotify or TikTok told you they are. Where the people who click your link page live.

We capture the visitor's approximate location from their IP, before any tracking pixels fire, and surface it at country level (free), country + region (Link plan and up), and country + region + city (Grow and up).

How accurate is it

Country: 99%+ accurate. Region/state: 90%+ accurate. City: 70-85% accurate depending on the country and whether the visitor is on home wifi vs. mobile data vs. a corporate VPN. We're using IP-to-geo databases that update weekly, and we apply a confidence threshold — if the city resolution is uncertain (e.g. a roaming mobile connection) we show 'major metro area' instead of a specific city.

Decisions location data actually drives

Five concrete examples from the creators we've watched use this well:

1. 1Tour routing. A band looked at their click map and realised 14% of their audience was in Brazil — but they had no Latin American dates planned. They added two São Paulo shows. Both sold out in 90 minutes.
2. 2Localisation priority. A newsletter looked at the country mix and saw 22% German-speaking. They translated their welcome sequence to German first instead of Spanish. Open rate jumped 38% on the German list.
3. 3Shipping rates. A merch operator could see that 31% of their Stripe traffic resolved to the UK but only 14% of orders converted. The culprit was £18 shipping. Negotiated cheaper shipping, conversion jumped.
4. 4Time-of-day posting. A coach saw that her booking page got most of its clicks from Australia between 7am-10am AEST. She started posting her Instagram Stories at 6am London time to hit that window — bookings doubled.
5. 5Pricing strategy. A digital-product seller noticed her Mexico/Brazil/Argentina traffic clicked the product but rarely converted. She set up purchasing power parity discounts for those geos — sales from those countries climbed 4×.

The privacy story

Location is derived from the IP at request time. We do not store the visitor's IP itself — only the resolved location (country, region, city). The resolution happens in-memory and is never logged in any form that could later be used to identify a visitor. This is compliant with GDPR's 'purpose limitation' principle — we use the IP for the specific purpose of geo-resolution and discard it.

If you operate in a jurisdiction that requires explicit consent for any location processing (EU, UK), Linkstacked is GDPR-compliant out of the box — but you should still mention location analytics in your privacy policy. We have a template you can copy.

Reading the geo dashboard

Four views to know:

• World heatmap — at-a-glance, dark = high traffic, light = low. Useful for explaining your audience to a manager or label.
• Country leaderboard — sorted by clicks, with growth-rate column. Watch for countries climbing month-over-month — those are markets opening up.
• City leaderboard — top 50 cities. Useful for tour planning and meet-up scheduling.
• Per-link geo — same data, restricted to clicks on a specific link. Lets you see whether your merch shop traffic skews UK while your podcast traffic skews US.

Plan differences

Free (Link) plan shows top 5 countries. Grow unlocks the full country leaderboard, region breakdown, and city resolution. Build adds the per-link geo view and 12 months of geo history. Scale adds the data-export API and country-level conversion rate cross-tabs.

Look at your map this week

If you've never looked at where your audience actually is, you owe yourself 10 minutes with the world heatmap. Most creators find at least one country they didn't expect in their top 10 — and that surprise usually unlocks a real strategic decision (tour stop, language priority, ad targeting). It's the kind of look that pays for itself.