Frequently Asked Questions

Digital Element offers a comprehensive portfolio of IP intelligence datasets designed to support targeting, risk assessment, compliance, fraud prevention, and investigative use cases. Each dataset provides a different layer of insight, allowing organizations to move beyond basic IP geolocation.

• NetAcuity is Digital Element’s flagship IP geolocation database. It delivers accurate geographic and network attributes for IP addresses worldwide, supporting use cases such as audience targeting, content localization, analytics, and compliance.

• Nodify adds intelligence for anonymized and high-risk traffic. It identifies VPNs, proxies, residential proxies, and other anonymization technologies while providing contextual signals to help distinguish legitimate users from potentially abusive activity.

• IPC (IP Characteristics) provides behavioral context for IP addresses. It transforms raw IP data into actionable intelligence by revealing stability, movement patterns, device volume, and geographic consistency, helping organizations assess confidence, risk, and network quality.

• IP Forensics enables historical IP intelligence and retrospective analysis. It allows organizations to understand where an IP address has been over time, supporting investigations, compliance reviews, incident response, and forensic workflows.

Together, these datasets provide a layered view of IP intelligence, combining location, behavior, risk, and historical context to support more informed decision-making.

Digital Element data covers 99.9999 percent of routable IPv4 and IPv6 addresses that customers are likely to encounter. This global coverage enables accurate targeting, analysis, and enforcement across virtually all countries and regions worldwide.

In addition to broad coverage, Digital Element delivers exceptional geographic depth. NetAcuity maps IP addresses to more than four million distinct geolocations globally, including country, region, city, postal code, and sub-postal levels. This approach moves beyond basic city-centroid placement and supports more precise geographic intelligence wherever network infrastructure allows.

For organizations that require even finer granularity, Digital Element offers its Alternate Area Database (AADB). AADB extends traditional postal-level IP geolocation with additional regional geographic frameworks, including:

• ZIP+4 in the United States
• SA1 in Australia
• IRIS in France
• PLZ8 in Germany

These enhanced geographic layers allow organizations to apply sub-postal precision in supported markets while maintaining global IP coverage and consistency.

This combination of near-total IP coverage and highly granular geolocation enables organizations to confidently support both global-scale and high-precision use cases within a single IP intelligence framework.

Yes. Digital Element can target mobile internet users. Our IP geolocation and intelligence data include the ability to identify and segment traffic based on IP addresses associated with mobile networks (including cellular and mobile broadband). Because mobile devices typically connect through carrier networks, Digital Element’s intelligence can determine when an IP belongs to a mobile operator and provide corresponding geolocation, network, and connection-type context. This enables marketers and platforms to tailor experiences, ads, and content specifically for mobile audiences.

Digital Element provides one of the most comprehensive and frequently updated VPN and proxy intelligence datasets available.

Our Nodify solution detects a wide range of anonymization technologies, including commercial VPNs, residential proxies, hosting proxies, and other anonymized infrastructure. Nodify evaluates VPN and proxy traffic using dozens of contextual signals, helping organizations assess risk more accurately and avoid binary decisioning.

Nodify intelligence is refreshed daily and engineered to support near real-time decisioning environments, enabling organizations to identify anonymized traffic as it occurs. This ensures that VPN and proxy detection keeps pace with rapidly evolving anonymization infrastructure.

By analyzing IP behavior, stability, and persistence over time, Nodify helps customers reduce false positives while still identifying traffic associated with abuse, fraud, or policy violations.

Yes. Digital Element fully supports IPv6 and continues to expand coverage as IPv6 adoption grows globally.

As the internet transitions toward IPv6, accurate IP intelligence becomes even more important. Digital Element’s infrastructure-based approach is designed to scale with the expanding address space while maintaining accuracy and reliability.

Low-cost IP geolocation solutions often rely on limited data sources, infrequent updates, or simplified geolocation methodologies. As a result, accuracy and coverage decline considerably at more granular geographic levels, particularly outside the United States.

Organizations that depend on precise location data for fraud prevention, streaming enforcement, compliance, or measurement often find that lower-quality data leads to higher false positives, missed risk, and inconsistent performance.

Digital Element prioritizes data quality, validation, and global consistency, which is critical for high-stakes use cases.

Digital Element has been providing IP location and intelligence data since 1999 and is widely recognized as a technical leader in the space.

Our differentiation lies in how data is gathered, validated, and supported. Digital Element combines infrastructure-level analysis, device-derived validation, global coverage, and dedicated customer support to deliver IP intelligence organizations can trust for critical decisions. This approach has earned the confidence of some of the world’s largest brands, who rely on our data to power high-stakes use cases across advertising, security, streaming, and compliance.

Digital Element offers multiple deployment options to fit a wide range of environments and workflows, including API access, cloud delivery, and file-based formats.

Deployment is designed to be straightforward and flexible, allowing most customers to integrate quickly with minimal engineering effort.

NetAcuity IP geolocation data is updated weekly to maintain accuracy and reflect changes in global network behavior.

Nodify VPN and proxy intelligence is updated daily to keep pace with rapidly evolving anonymization infrastructure.

Digital Element provides 24/7 technical support backed by a team of IP intelligence experts.

Our support team works closely with customers to answer questions, troubleshoot issues, and help organizations get the most value from their IP intelligence data across use cases.

Digital Element pricing is based on value rather than volume and is tailored to each customer’s needs.

Pricing is influenced by:

• The use cases being supported
• The scale of data usage and environments
• The level of precision and other attributes required

This flexible approach ensures customers receive the right data for their objectives without unnecessary complexity.