Region and city dimension
The region and city dimensions place a visit below country level — a state/region and a city — derived from IP geolocation. They look precise but are the least reliable geo tier: IP-to-city mapping is approximate, mobile and carrier routing can place a visit hundreds of kilometres off, and many visits resolve only to country, showing '(not set)' for city. Use them for rough regional skew, never as a real location.
What this means
Region (state/province) and city refine the country dimension using a finer IP-to-location lookup. They aim to answer 'which parts of a country?' for market and content decisions at an aggregate level.
Why accuracy collapses below country
IP-to-city databases are estimates that degrade fast: a visit may resolve to an ISP's registered city rather than the user's, mobile traffic can be routed through distant gateways, and many IP ranges only map to a country, leaving city '(not set)'. Concentrations frequently mark network infrastructure, not population. Read sub-country geo as a rough skew across many visits, never as an individual's location.
- Finer IP-to-place lookup than country
- Resolves to ISP/gateway location, not the user
- Frequently '(not set)' below country level
How it appears in analytics and logs
A region/city value is an approximate IP-to-place lookup. A concentration in one city often reflects an ISP hub or carrier gateway, not where visitors actually are.
Diagnostic use case
Use region/city only for coarse regional patterns at scale, treating any single visit's city as unreliable and expecting frequent '(not set)' values.
What WebmasterID can help detect
WebmasterID keeps geolocation deliberately coarse and flags how unreliable city-level data is, so regional reporting is honest about its precision limits.
Common mistakes
- Trusting city as a real visitor location.
- Reading an ISP-hub concentration as audience density.
- Ignoring how often city resolves to '(not set)'.
Privacy and accuracy notes
Sub-country geo is approximate and privacy-sensitive. WebmasterID keeps geo coarse, avoids pinpointing individuals, and stores no raw IPs.
Related pages
- Country dimension (coarse, edge-derived)
The country dimension assigns each visit a country, derived by looking up the visitor's IP address in a geolocation database — often at the CDN edge. It is intentionally coarse: country-level, not address-level. VPNs, proxies, mobile carrier routing, and corporate egress can all place a visit in the wrong country, so it is a strong aggregate signal and a weak per-visit one.
- City-level geo accuracy and its limits
City-level geo is the lowest-confidence common geolocation tier and carries the highest privacy risk. This page explains why IP-to-city mapping is unreliable, why claiming a visitor's city is both error-prone and privacy-invasive, and why country is the responsible default.
- Region and state-level geo accuracy
Region and state-level geo is coarser in confidence than country: edge geo databases map IPs to sub-national areas far less reliably than to countries. This page explains why sub-national geo should be read with extra caution and never overclaimed.
- Privacy-first analytics
Coarse geo that does not pinpoint individuals.
Sources and verification notes
Last reviewed 2026-06-24. Facts are checked against primary/official sources where available; uncertain specifics are marked “Data not yet verified” rather than guessed.