Q: What is Geo?
A: Geo is an innovative online service that visually represents your website activity in real-time with respect to location. Basically Geo shows you where your visitors are from, when they arrive, and what pages they access, worldwide. Aesthetics are a primary focus for Geo; in fact Geo is specifically designed to be displayed in physical spaces such as your office, lobby, or boardroom. In addition, Geo is highly customizable so you can tweak it to meet your organization's specific needs. Since Geo is a hosted solution there's no software for you to install and maintain, and no extra load on your servers.
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Q: Why should I use Geo?
A: Installing a Geo display in your office is like creating a window into your organization. Geo let's you watch trends and patterns in your website activity as they happen. For a company with a primarily web-based business model, Geo creates a connection between the virtual face it shows the world and it's "brick & mortar" home. Moreover Geo conveys your organization's online presence to your employees, investors, and customers. Did we mention it's pretty darn cool?
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Q: Is Geo difficult to use?
A: No, it's quite easy. We designed Geo to be as simple as possible. To set up your Geo service, you need only the most basic HTML skills (or just have your web designer do it for you). Using Geo is even easier; as long as you can use a web browser such as Firefox, Internet Explorer, or Safari, then you are all set to go. If you have any trouble there is plenty of information in these FAQs, or you can contact us for help.
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Q: Does Geo work on secure sites?
A: Yes, indeed! You can track visitors to your secure pages just as you would to your non-secure pages. Just paste the same Geo-provided code snippet onto the page. It won't interfere with your SSL certificates, and your visitors won't notice any differences.
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Q: I don't live in the United States, can I still use Geo?
A: Yes, definitely! You can use the Geo service no matter where your website is hosted and no matter where your visitors hail from. Geo can track visitors from all over the world. Also, Geo's maps can be customized to focus on the regions of the world you care about most.
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Q: I already have a web analytics service, do I need Geo too?
A: Short Answer: You need Geo. Longer Answer: Comparing the two is like comparing apples to oranges. Geo serves a different purpose than do traditional web analytics services. Web analytics provide you with statistical data about your website that can be used to analyze your performance and help to develop future strategies. Geo is a real-time artistic representation of what's happening on your site right now which is designed to be displayed in a physical space. While it allows you to see patterns and trends in your website activity, but it also helps to forge a tangible connection between the virtual realm of your website and the physical realm of your workspace. In other words, you need Geo.
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Q: Can Geo track different pages on my website?
A: Yes it can! In fact Geo can monitor traffic on as many pages of your website as you want (with no extra charges). In addition, you can separately track visitors to certain pages on your website. For example, you may want hits on your home page to appear as red dots in Geo, while hits to your order page appear as green dots in Geo. Geo actually provides you with many code snippets, the only difference amongst them is the image filename they refer to. All image file names are of the form "ghostXXX.gif" where "XXX" is a 3-digit number. So you could paste the "ghost001.gif" snippet on the home page and the "ghost002.gif" snippet on the order page. Then within your Geo preferences you would assign red to "ghost001.gif" and green to "ghost002.gif".
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Q: Will Geo slow down my site?
A: No not at all. When you use the Geo service, your visitors won't notice any difference. The code snippet you paste on your page loads a tiny, transparent, pixel-sized image from our high-speed servers. Compared to the graphics and content on your web page, the memory footprint of this image is negligible.
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Q: How accurate is the location info Geo provides?
A: The IP-to-location technology we use to determine where a visitor is located is highly accurate: over 99% accuracy on a country level, 90% accuracy on a state level, and 80% accuracy for the US within a 25 mile radius.
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Q: How current is the information provided by Geo?
A: Geo is real-time. That means when a visitor views your website, you see it happen live in Geo. Unlike other web analytics services, there's no waiting for periodic reports to see what's happening on your site. With Geo you get instant feedback. If you do notice a slight delay from when you navigate to your web page until the visit appears in Geo, then most likely your web page has a long load time. Try moving the Geo code snippet to the top of the body section in your HTML so it is retrieved sooner.
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Q: How accurately does Geo record hits?
A: Very accurately. Geo tracks every page view made by a human user from a web browser, but filters out hits from search engine crawlers, spiders, or bots. Geo also only ignores hits to the tracking pixel URL that are not referred by your domain. This means you need not worry about malicious agents inflating your page view totals by pinging the tracking pixels assigned to your account. Please note that page views can be undercounted as a result of caching.
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Q: How much does Geo cost?
A: We offer affordable service plans starting at $24 per month. Geo's price is dependent upon the monthly volume of traffic to the pages monitored by Geo. For more detailed information visit our pricing page.
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Q: Are upgrades free?
A: Yes, always. At Take Five Labs, we're constantly looking for ways to make the Geo experience better. Periodically we will introduce cool new features which automatically become available to all current subscribers. Nothing extra to pay and nothing extra to install.
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Q: Can I get a custom-built version of Geo?
A: Yes you can. The standard version of Geo is designed to meet a wide range of needs. It already allows you to modify many of Geo's graphical elements such as colors, sizes, shapes, and timing schemes. However if you require a unique setup or have an idea that will make your Geo stand out, we welcome any challenge; your imagination is the limit. Simply submit an inquiry form and we will respond promptly with a proposal.
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Q: How do I get Geo?
A: It's easy. All you need to do is subscribe. We'll send you code snippets which you must paste on the pages you want to monitor. Then simply log into your Geo account to view your visitors in real-time. Since Geo is a hosted solution, there's no software to install. We handle all the hard stuff on our end.
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Q: How do I use Geo?
A: Using Geo is easy. Once you have signed up and pasted the code snippets onto your web pages, you are ready to go. To see your Geo in action, simply login to your account. You should see people visiting your site. Try viewing a page from your website in your browser to test whether your Geo is setup correctly. Once everything is working properly you can try tracking different pages separately, or tweaking Geo's preferences to best suit your website. We designed Geo to be used on public displays, so we recommend that you connect a spare computer to a large monitor or flatscreen TV. Simply navigate to your Geo account in the web browser and set it to the full-screen viewing mode so you can show-off your site's Geo.
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Q: Where should I put my code snippet?
A: You can put the code snippet on any pages of your website; at the very least you'll want to put it on your home page. Geo actually provides you with many code snippets which can be used to track different pages of your website separately. This simple process is explained in another FAQ. When pasting a snippet onto an HTML page, you must paste it in it's entirety (unaltered) anywhere in the body of the page (between the <body> and </body> tags).
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Q: What are the best settings for my preferences?
A: That depends upon the characteristics of your website. The two most important settings to choose are how long a marker remains on-screen and how long the "bursting" animation lasts. If your website receives 10,000 visitors per day, then you probably don't want each visitor marker to remain on-screen for 12 hours because the map will be completely covered in dots. On the other hand, if you have low traffic (e.g. 1 visitor every 5 minutes) you don't want the marker to disapear after 15 seconds, because you might never see it and your map will always look empty. In our personal opinion, Geo is meant to be background art, not something you should feel compelled to stare at vigilantly, so select preferences with that in mind. Other settings control whether to fade or shrink markers over time. These can add another dimension to your display and are espcially useful if you get many visitors from a particular city. If you are tracking different web pages separately, the "layer" setting determines which markers get displayed on top of the others. Have fun!
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Q: My site uses Flash animation. Will Geo still work?
A: It depends. If your entire website is contained within a Flash animation, then Geo (and any other web analytics tool) cannot record where a visitor goes within the site. That said, if you embed the Flash animation within an HTML page, you can paste the Geo code snippet into the HTML and at least record when a visitor first arrives at your site. On the other hand, if you have a normal HTML-based website with Flash animations on the pages, Geo will work fine. Simply paste the code snippets into the HTML.
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Q: When I visit my website, Geo says the visit came from a different city. What's wrong?
A: The IP-to-location technology we use to determine where a visitor is located, is very good but not perfect. Accuracy can be affected by the visitor's ISP and population density of the visitor's area. In particular, Geo can give inaccurate results for visitors viewing your site via a mobile phone because their location is tied to their SIM card not nearby cell towers.
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Q: Why does Geo only show an event the first time I visit my site?
A: This is because your browser has cached your website, so our tracking pixel (the image file specified in the code snippet) is not retrieved on subsequent visits. Try clicking the "reload" button to reload your website. This should force your browser to re-retrieve all content on your page including the tracking pixel. Now you should see an event in Geo. Typically your website will be cached in the visitor's browser for no more than a day. However, if this behavior really bothers you, you can change the settings on your webserver to prevent visitor's from caching your site's pages.
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