Locations
The Locations report shows you the geographic distribution of your website visitors at the country level. It answers a simple but important question: where in the world is your audience?
How geo detection works
When a visitor loads a page with the Statalog tracker, their IP address is used to perform a country lookup against a local geolocation database. This lookup happens server-side at the moment the request is processed.
Critically, the IP address itself is never stored. Once the country code has been extracted from the lookup, the IP address is discarded immediately and permanently. No IP address ever appears in your analytics data, your exports, or Statalog's database. This is a deliberate privacy design decision, not a compliance workaround.
The result is that Statalog can tell you "this visitor is from Germany" without ever retaining any data that could be used to identify or trace that visitor.
Why no city-level tracking
Many analytics tools offer city-level or region-level geo data. Statalog deliberately does not. City-level location data, when combined with other signals (device type, browser, time of visit), can contribute to re-identification of individuals — particularly for low-traffic sites where a city narrows down the possible visitor pool significantly.
Staying at the country level keeps the data genuinely aggregate and non-identifying, consistent with Statalog's GDPR-compliant, cookieless approach.
The world map visualisation
The Locations report includes a world map that shades countries according to their share of your traffic. Darker shading indicates higher visitor volume. The map gives you an at-a-glance geographic overview that is often more intuitive than a table when you are looking for broad patterns — for example, whether your traffic is concentrated in one region or spread internationally.
Hovering over or clicking a country on the map highlights it and shows the visitor count for that country.
The countries table
Below the map, a ranked table lists every country that generated at least one visit in the selected date range, showing:
- Country — the country name and flag
- Visitors — unique visitors from that country
- Sessions — total sessions from that country (a visitor can have multiple sessions)
Clicking a country in the table applies it as a dashboard filter, scoping all other reports — pages, devices, referrers, goals — to visitors from that country only. This lets you answer questions like "What pages do my US visitors read?" or "What devices do visitors from Japan use?"
Use cases
Understanding your international reach If you write in English and see significant traffic from non-English-speaking countries, it may indicate a translation or localisation opportunity. If you are running a business in a specific country and see unexpected traffic from elsewhere, it might signal organic international interest worth cultivating.
Validating campaign targeting If you run geo-targeted paid campaigns, the Locations report filtered to the relevant date range confirms whether your traffic is arriving from the intended countries. Discrepancies between ad platform geo data and Statalog's data can reveal targeting misconfiguration or ad fraud.
Prioritising time zones for support and publishing Knowing which countries dominate your traffic helps you schedule content releases, social posts, and support availability to align with when your actual audience is online.
FAQ
How accurate is the country detection? Statalog uses a regularly updated local geolocation database. Country-level accuracy for IP geolocation is typically above 95% for most countries. Accuracy drops for certain regions, VPN users, and corporate proxy traffic, where the IP may not reflect the user's physical location.
What about visitors using VPNs or proxies? Visitors using VPNs or corporate proxies will be geolocated to the country of their VPN exit node or proxy server, not their physical location. This is an inherent limitation of IP-based geolocation and affects all analytics tools that use this method.
Will the IP lookup comply with GDPR if the IP is discarded? Yes. Processing an IP address to derive a country code and then discarding the IP immediately is consistent with the GDPR principle of data minimisation. Statalog processes the IP address for a single, limited purpose (country lookup) and does not retain it. No personal data derived from the IP — beyond the country code — is stored.