Find what company a visitor is coming from?

Question

In Google Analytics under Audience -> Technology -> Network its possible to see from what Service Provider a visitor came from. Pretty often when a visitor is sitting on a companies network Google Analytics is able to display that companies name.

What data is it Google Analytics is parsing to archive this? I would like to parse this on my own statistics program as well.

My statistics app runs on Node.js, how could i parse this in nodejs? Do i get the IP address in node and do something with that?

@user568109 the technology doesn't matter, the answer is the web service that returns the information. — Andrew Grothe, Oct 02 '13 at 15:30
@agrothe The question also says how would you parse it in node.js. — user568109, Oct 02 '13 at 15:34

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Oct 03 '13 at 04:58

The company a particular IP address belongs to is generally obtained from a IP properties database. Vendors such as MaxMind and Digital Envoy produce these databases, and companies such as Google use them to generate the statistics you are referring to. These databases are curated, so there is some level of error to them. They are primarily used to do geo-IP lookups (estimating your geo-location from your IP address), but many properties can be associated with an IP address, including it's owning company.

Find what company a visitor is coming from?

1 Answers1