Independent Audit Validates Accuracy of Akamai’s IP Location Service

Akamai Technologies, Inc. today announced the results of an independent performance assessment of its IP location service conducted by Gomez, Inc. The Akamai IP location service provides a range of insight for content providers about an Internet end user’s geographic location including country, state, city, zip code, area code, as well as device type, connection type, and actual connection speed, among others.

ShopLocal for many years has relied heavily upon Akamai's content distribution network (CDN) for site and media caching as well as their great GeoIP targeting services.

Results from the Gomez audit show that Akamai achieved 100 percent accuracy – providing an exact match for every IP address – at the country level on a global scale, and at the state and city level within the U.S. Akamai also achieved 97.22 percent accuracy when determining IP addresses at the city level across the globe.

Akamai customers leverage its IP location service for multiple use cases, including:

• Marketing – create a personalized end-user experience by delivering geographically-targeted information, such as language, pricing, advertising, shipping instructions
• Fraud Protection – identify patterns for proxy hijacking of banking and retail transactions
• Mobile Device Detection – tailor content based on end users’ device
• Rights Management / Compliance – comply with the digital rights of licensed content and meet regulatory compliance restrictions on software downloads
• Security – monitor access to corporate networks

“ShopLocal uses Akamai to identify, by IP address, the location from which an end user is accessing our site,” said Edward McLaughlin, Senior Director of Technology at ShopLocal. “This technology has been instrumental for us to automatically present content and localized promotions best suited for the location of our Client’s end users. Our Client’s customers expect a very personalized experience, so the accuracy of Akamai’s IP location data is paramount to the success of their online offerings.”

“Our Clients that leverage automatic IP location data see a 13 percent increase in conversion rate of first-time visitors compared to clients that require their first-time visitors to provide their location by entering their zip code manually,” said Loch Rose, Vice President of Analytics at ShopLocal.

To learn more about the Gomez audit click here.