State/province & city tracking with an interactive map in Burst Pro
Understanding where your audience is located is fundamental to making informed decisions. It helps you tailor content, focus marketing efforts, and optimize your services for the right regions. While Burst has always provided country-level data, we’re excited to announce a significant enhancement for Burst Pro users: advanced state and city-level location tracking, complete with a new, interactive world view map.
Before we explore the new features, it’s important to clarify how this data is collected. In line with our commitment to privacy by design, Burst does not store visitor IP addresses. The IP is used to find out where the visitor is located, but is never saved. Because of this, we cannot retroactively add state or city information to visits that were recorded before you updated the plugin.
This new, granular location data is only available for visits recorded after the feature is enabled. You will see a notice in the world view indicating how many visitors have an “unknown region” to ensure the data is interpreted correctly. We believe this is the correct approach to providing powerful analytics while uncompromisingly protecting user privacy.
Visualizing your global reach: the interactive world view
The centerpiece of this update is the new world view widget. This isn’t just a static image; it’s a fully interactive choropleth map where color intensity directly corresponds to the metric you’ve selected. Darker shades indicate higher numbers, giving you an immediate visual sense of your key geographic areas.
You can zoom, pan, and hover over countries to see their specific data. To get more detailed insights, simply click on a country. The map will zoom in to show you a breakdown by state or region, providing a new layer of understanding.
From countries to cities: granular location data
Alongside the map, the locations table has been upgraded to include state and city data. This allows you to move beyond the visual overview and see a precise, sortable list of where your visitors are coming from, right down to the city level. This detailed view is perfect for identifying specific urban centers that are driving traffic or conversions.
Tailor your analysis: metrics, classification, and accessibility
True to Burst’s philosophy, you have full control over how your data is presented. The world view map comes with a comprehensive set of options to help you analyze the data in a way that is most useful to you.
Select your metric
You can visualize the map based on several key metrics:
- Visitors
- Sessions
- Bounce rate
- Avg. session duration
- Conversion rate
This allows you to answer specific questions, such as “which regions have the highest engagement?” or “where are my conversion rates lowest?”.
Understanding classification methods
The way data is grouped into color ranges on the map can significantly impact your interpretation. We provide several standard classification methods, with an auto-select option that picks the best method for the chosen metric.
- Natural breaks (Jenks): The recommended default. It identifies natural groupings in the data to create the most accurate representation.
- Equal interval: Divides the data into groups of equal size ranges.
- Standard deviation: Shows how much a region’s data varies from the average.
- Quantile: Distributes an equal number of regions into each color group.
Accessibility first
We believe data should be accessible to everyone. You can enable colorblind patterns, which adds a distinct pattern to each color on the map. This ensures that the data can be clearly interpreted by users with various forms of color vision deficiency.
Combine filters for powerful segmentation
This new location data fully integrates with Burst’s existing filtering system. This means you can combine location with any other available filter for incredibly powerful segmentation.
For example, you can now analyze:
- Visitors from the UK using a mobile device.
- The average session duration for users in Germany who arrived from a specific referrer.
- The conversion rate in the Netherlands for a page
This level of combined filtering allows you to drill down into your data to uncover actionable insights that were previously out of reach.
Get started with advanced location tracking
This powerful new set of features is available now in Burst Pro. Get Burst Pro now! Already a Burst Pro subscriber, simply update the plugin to the latest version to begin collecting and visualizing state and city-level data