Geo Pulse #58 — Trusting one GEO signal too much

Geo Pulse #58 — Trusting one GEO signal too much
Theme: the single-source-of-truth mistake in geolocation.

→ Relying on IP geo alone for city-level targeting. IP databases are reliable at country level, shaky at city, and wrong for mobile carriers that route through distant gateways. Fix: don't make city-level decisions on IP; use it for country only.

→ Mobile carrier NAT. An entire region of mobile users can appear from one carrier hub city. City-targeted budgets get misallocated.

→ Layer your signals. IP (country), device/browser locale (language), and explicit user input (shipping country) — when they disagree, prefer the explicit one.

→ Don't over-promise. If a vendor claims 'street-level IP accuracy' globally, that's a red flag. Accuracy degrades sharply below country. Credit: anyone who's compared two IP-geo vendors on the same dataset and seen them disagree.