When a user gives feedback via your Saber Feedback button, we record the IP address of the user. We then use a geolocation service to find out the approximate physical location of the user.
Saber Feedback showing IP address and location
There’s a limit to the accuracy of geolocation. At best we can detect the city or region and country.
Furthermore, internet service providers often change a user’s IP address, and then allocate the previous IP address to another user in a different location. It can take days or weeks for geolocation databases to be updated with the new location.
So sometimes the location provided by a geolocation service can be quite inaccurate.
When testing a new feature of Saber Feedback, I noticed that my own location was inaccurate. I’m in Barcelona, but the geolocation database we use was showing my location as a small town about 70km north of Barcelona.
We were using a geolocation database on our own server, and we were updating the database monthly. This was okay for accuracy, but not ideal. An always up-to-date database would be better.
We’ve now switched to a different provider of geolocation data called IPinfo. We no longer store the geolocation data on our own server. Instead we do a live lookup via IPinfo’s API.
This has significantly increased the accuracy of our location data.
It is still not always 100% perfect; it is the nature of how IP addresses are allocated to users that there always can be some doubt. But it is much better. And now, when I test our feedback widget, Saber Feedback correctly shows me as living in Barcelona.
You don’t need to do anything to get this more accurate location data. We’ve already rolled this out to all our customers, whether still on a trial or currently paying for a subscription.