Permission required to use this feature: lists and subscribers
Geographic location data is collected for subscribers when they sign up through a subscribe form, or interact with an email you've sent. You can use this data to send campaigns in each recipient's time zone, or to create more targeted content based on location.
If we have detected a subscriber's location, you'll see this information in places like subscriber snapshots, Worldview reports, and subscriber notification emails. For example:
How geolocation works
The location feature works by checking the IP address of the subscriber against an IP-to-location database. This also happens every time a subscriber opens or clicks a link in an HTML campaign you've sent them..
How accurate the location is can vary quite widely. For highly populated areas, where records in the database are extensive, you can get pinpoint accuracy, but in other cases only quite broad areas are associated with a particular IP address.
The accuracy of the IP-to-location database will increase over time as more and more data is gathered. While you can't, for now, rely on the absolute accuracy of location records it is a great way to get an overview of where your subscribers are.
Inaccurate locations
If you see a location that looks inaccurate, or you know for sure that it is, there are a number of reasons that it could be wrong. The most common reasons are explained below.
VPN connection
If the recipient is connected through a VPN, the IP address of the VPN server will be used rather than the IP address of the user's physical location. So, for example, if a recipient is in London connected to their office via a VPN in New York, we will show New York as their location.
Dynamic IP addresses
Some ISPs use dynamic IP addresses, which means the same person can have two different IPs on different days. IPs are also re-allocated, so an IP that was today given to a person in London might tomorrow be allocated to a person in Edinburgh.
We update the locations of IP addresses regularly but it may be out of date at times.
Security software
Some anti-virus or spam filtering software pre-checks emails before they are delivered to the inbox by 'clicking' links and scanning images. In those cases, the IP address we record is that of the software's server instead of the recipient's physical location.
Email forwarding
If a subscriber shares their copy of an email with other people — for example, by forwarding the message from their inbox, or sharing a "view in browser" link online — we record the IP address of those who opened the email, which could an entirely different location to the original recipient.
We don't have any way to know that it's a different person so the location shown for clicks and opens will be changed in your reports.
Include forward-to-a-friend links in all your emails. When your subscribers use this instead of sharing their own copy of an email, it ensures that tracking data is recorded for the original recipient only.
Gmail image proxying
Since Gmail started displaying images by default, subscribers using Gmail as their email client (via webmail, iOS or Android) may have no location recorded (and in some older cases have their location recorded as Mountain View, California) instead of their physical location.
This is because Gmail is now caching and serving email images via Google's proxy servers in Mountain View, instead of serving images directly from the original host servers. If a subscriber uses Gmail but also views your campaigns in other email clients, you will see their last non-gmail open location instead.
Apple Mail Privacy Protection
In 2021, Apple launched Mail Privacy Protection (MPP), which gives Apple device users more control over their data. For subscribers that opt-in, Apple Mail will download images when an email is received in the inbox, not when it’s opened. The IP address of the user (i.e. their location) will also be obscured. The subscriber's location is therefore likely to be unreliable, appearing instead as the location of Apple’s data centres.
Therefore, we no longer record a subscriber's location when we suspect it has been impacted by Apple MPP, instead listing it as "unknown".
