ClustrMaps – See where your website visitors are from!

I blogged about A&B Butterflies here but what I also noticed about their website was the world map showing where their website visitors were from, and I thought that was all kinds of awesome!

This magic was accomplished by the nice folks at ClustrMaps, who provide this service for free (unless you have a really large number of daily visitors).

So, a few days ago, I setup ClustrMaps for www.glassblower.info and here is what I have so far:

For those who are interested in learning more about how this is possible, take a look at this Geolocation article from Wikipedia, and keep in mind that IANA (International Assigned Names and Numbers) assigns address blocks (IPv4 and IPv6) to various countries.

This geolocation also goes by the name GEOIP, and if you Google you will find it is possible to download the IPv4 IP-to-Country mapping as a CSV (Excel) spreadsheet (more than 110,000 rows!).

And here is the www.glassblower.info ClustrMap after approximately ONE WEEK:

And here is the www.glassblower.info ClustrMap after approximately ONE MONTH:

Below is the map of our first 10,000 ClustrMap visitors to www.glassblower.info:

And here we are already at the two-month point, and more than 15,000 visitors:

I have enjoyed visually seeing (on a daily basis) where my visitors are from, that I decided to upgrade from the free version to the paid version which is called ClustrMaps+. More information about upgrading can be found on their web page here. The cost is minimal (a little over US$1 per month, when paid annually), and provides these benefits:
1. No advertisements
2. Ability to zoom into continents
3. Counts of visitors by Continent
4. An unlimited archive of maps
5. More map style options

Here we are on December 19, 2010 — showing the results of the first three months of using ClustrMaps:

And here is where we are after 5 months:

Wow, guess I should update this blog, now we have about 11 months of visitor information, more than 79,000 visitors world-wide!