How does CANDDi identify Company Names from IP Lookup?

One of the ways CANDDi obtains Company Identified and Location information is by using IP Lookup, however this is only an approximation; certain edge-cases are not accurate. This article looks at these edge-cases and how you can ‘train’ CANDDi to improve relevance for your organisation.

When a visitor arrives on your website then CANDDi will perform a reverse IP lookup. Essentially we're running this query to identify the registered owner of the IP address. Wikipedia Article: whois [ip address]

For large corporations and organisations with their own registered IP Address, this returns significant amounts of data, and allows CANDDi to make solid assumptions about the organisation for whom this Contact may work.

For example: whois 195.195.44.51 would go as follows:

whois 195.195.44.51

__

inetnum: 195.195.44.0 - 195.195.47.255

netname: WALCAT-2

descr: Walsall College of Arts and Technology

country: GB

__

address: Walsall College of Arts and Technology

address: St. Paul's Street

address: Walsall, WS1 1XN

address: United Kingdom

phone: + 44 1922 657000

This publicly available data is telling us that the Contact who visited from behind IP address 195.195.44.51 was browsing from within Walsall College of Arts and Technology.

CANDDi believes that our mission is to display all the raw and processed data to you in a manner that makes it simple to understand, but make it possible for you to drill down to identify the source of the raw data if you need to.

IP records are displayed in the 'IP Address' in the Contact View.

You can also build streams and filters using this data.

If CANDDi identifies a location or company name, then these are displayed on the map and in the personal widget.

IP Lookup is very effective as a means of identifying larger organisations with their own static IP addresses. Unfortunately, there are two cases where it falls down:

1. The visitor is browsing from a mobile device (phone/tablet) over a mobile network.

If the visitor is browsing your site using a mobile device using wifi then the IP address reported will be the IP address of the fixed wifi device (and hence will report the ‘corporate details’). However, if the visitor is browsing using a mobile device on the mobile network then the IP address will be registered to one of the major mobile networks (Vodafone, O2 etc..). In this case, CANDDi will filter the Company Name and location, and will report this visitor as having ‘no company yet’.

2. The visitor is browsing from a dynamic IP address (or an IP address registered to an ISP).

If the visitor is browsing your site from a connection with a dynamic IP address or an IP address registered to an ISP (this is the case for most home broadband users or for most small businesses), then the IP address is registered to the ISP. The location of the IP address is typically the head office for the ISP.

Before displaying any data from IP lookup, CANDDi runs the data through an ISP filter. This is a blacklist of ‘known ISP's’; you won't see anyone on your site who works for ‘Sky Broadband’. In this case, CANDDi will filter the Company name and location, and will report this visitor as having ‘no company yet’.

However, our ISP filter sometimes misses out ISPs. We're constantly keeping it up to date - but there are lots of ISPs out there. In this case, CANDDi might report the company name and location incorrectly. If that happens, let us know and we will update the record.

Have more questions? Contact us at hello@canddi.com or 0161 414 1080

Updated on: 05/02/2020