'IP country' field not populating correctly

[M_Kelly]

Hi - we are wanting to send Marketing emails to customers in specific countries. We have a 'country' property that is populated via what a contact selects via a drop-down on a web form. We have many contacts  with this field not populated. I was wanting to bring over the country listed in the 'IP country' field, however, in many instances this country is incorrect, ie a contact I know is located in Australia has an ip country of United States, another has selected their country as Zimbabwe, yet HubSpot have auto-filled the ip country as Australia. How is this field populated and for what reason could it be so wrong? Currently I can't use it to fill the 'Country' property as the info is not accurate.

Any help appreciated!

thanks 🙂

[franksteiner79 · Accepted solution]

Hi @M_Kelly 

HubSpot fills these IP properties either trough cookied conversions or marketing email clicks. In both cases, this is done by matching an IP address to a country, region and city. 

It's not unusual for this not to be 100% correct, especially when people use VPNs, quite common to access work systems in a few industries, which then causes a mismatch between IP information and actual location.

Frank

[karstenkoehler · Accepted solution]

Hi @M_Kelly,

According to the documentation, HubSpot is not making any assumptions here, it's simply checking the country reported by the contact's IP address: https://knowledge.hubspot.com/properties/hubspots-default-contact-properties

• IP country: the country reported by the contact's IP address. This is automatically set by HubSpot and can be used for segmentation and reporting.
• IP country code: the country code (in alpha-2 format) reported by the contact's IP address. This is automatically set by HubSpot and can be used for segmentation and reporting.

In other words, this is entirely reliant on the IP address of the contact. If they're using a Virtual Private Network (VPN), Proxies, Network Address Translation (NAT), access the website from a data center or cloud environment, dynamic or reallocated IPs, information might not look like what you expect. In that sense, in 2024 this is not supposed to be 100% reliable. Users and companies use a variety of technologies which can camouflage, intentionally or not, where they're from.

Best regards

[franksteiner79 · Accepted solution]

Hi @M_Kelly 

HubSpot fills these IP properties either trough cookied conversions or marketing email clicks. In both cases, this is done by matching an IP address to a country, region and city. 

It's not unusual for this not to be 100% correct, especially when people use VPNs, quite common to access work systems in a few industries, which then causes a mismatch between IP information and actual location.

Frank