Improving User Engagement with Timezone / Local Time
In the digital era, personalization is the cornerstone of enhanced user experience. As services become more global, they also need to be local in their approach, and understanding a user’s local time plays a pivotal role in this localization effort. It allows developers to bridge the geographical gap and establish a more meaningful connection with users around the world. Some common uses cases are :
- Effective Marketing Campaigns: Advertisers and marketers can launch campaigns that align with users’ daytime activities or habits. For instance, a coffee brand might target ads for the morning, while a movie streaming service might promote its content in the evening.
- Localized Promotions & Events: E-commerce platforms can schedule flash sales or special events according to the majority of their users’ local times, ensuring maximum participation. Similarly, game servers can schedule maintenance downtimes during off-peak hours for the majority of their player base.
- Optimized Notifications: If a service sends notifications, timing them correctly can be crucial. For instance, you wouldn’t want to ping a user about a sale or update in the middle of their night. Knowing their local time allows for scheduling notifications when they’re most likely to be receptive, increasing engagement and reducing the risk of annoying users.
- Analytics & User Behavior Insights: Analyzing user behavior based on local time can offer invaluable insights. For instance, understanding peak usage hours, or identifying patterns like when users are most likely to make a purchase, can guide business strategies.
- Scheduling & Collaboration Tools: For platforms that involve scheduling, like meeting or event planners, understanding time zones is imperative. By automatically adjusting to a participant’s local time, these tools can suggest optimal meeting slots, minimizing the back-and-forth often involved in coordinating across time zones.
- Enhanced Support: Customer support can anticipate high query times and allocate resources accordingly. Additionally, support messages can be crafted with an awareness of the user’s time, like acknowledging if they’re reaching out outside of typical business hours.
- Personalized Greetings & Content Delivery: Websites and apps can offer greetings that align with the user’s current time of day. This subtle touch fosters a connection and makes the user feel that the platform is tailored for them.
In essence, being aware of a user’s local time is more than just a technical nuance. It’s a powerful tool that, when leveraged correctly, can greatly elevate the user experience, making digital platforms feel more intuitive, considerate, and tailored to each user’s individual context.
A great solution to this problem is the ipapi.co API, which provides the timezone in IANA format based on a user’s IP address. In this article, we’ll walk you through how this API works and how you can fetch the local time of a user with the help of this API.
The API
ipapi.co API is an intuitive web service allowing developers to pinpoint a user’s IANA timezone string. The response from this API is in a simple TXT (or JSON / XML / CSV / YAML ) format, ensuring ease of integration into various applications.
To determine the timezone (and local time) the API needs the IP address of your user. There are 2 ways you can provide it to the API :
a) In the URL (e.g. 8.8.8.8 is the IP for which you wish to find the timezone)
> GET https://ipapi.co/8.8.8.8/timezone/
America/Los_Angelesb) Infer from the API call (e.g. if the API call initiated from a user in New York, the result would be )
> GET https://ipapi.co/timezone/
America/New_YorkIn subsequent posts (linked below), we will share code snippets that uses the API to find the timezone as well as the local time of the user.
