Companies by geographic location
When to filter by location
Geographic location is one of the first things that comes to mind when we want to define the company segment we’ll target commercially.
Mostly because if we only sell our products or services in Spain, generating leads in Lithuania, Burundi or Singapore won’t do us much good.
Seems obvious, right?
But if we go a bit deeper, location can do much more than simply defining the country we care about.
It’s very common for companies to split their sales teams by territories that may or may not match the country’s official administrative divisions. For example, having a “North‑West territory” that covers Galicia, Asturias and the Province of León.
It can also be the case that salespeople want to generate leads in specific postcodes to make the most of a business trip or any other travel.
For instance: I’m going to the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, and I’ll take the opportunity to have a look at which companies have offices near Montjuïc.
For all of the above reasons, we’ve defined a set of geographic filters with different levels of granularity to help you segment your ideal customer more precisely.
Keep reading this article to:
- Find out where we source the data from,
- Understand which geographic filters we provide,
- And clearly grasp the pitfalls and nuances behind these filters.
Don’t stop reading!
Available filters
We offer the following filters, ordered from lower to higher geographic granularity:
Companies by Country
The Company Country filter is the only one that is pre‑configured when you start a new segmentation. From there, you have a blank canvas to build your own segmentation however you like.
To explain why this filter is enabled by default — and how many countries we cover in Atogu — we included a separate article in our documentation.
Here you can read more about how to filter companies by country.
Companies by Region
From here on, things get interesting.
While Company Country is self‑explanatory, the concept of Company Region varies depending on the country you’re targeting.
That’s because each country has a different set of administrative divisions, and they are not always directly comparable across countries.
To reduce the confusion this can create, whenever possible we follow international standards to define the concept of region.
For European countries, we define Company Region as the NUTS I and II levels established by Eurostat. At this level you’ll find, for example, Autonomous Communities in Spain or Régions in France.
If you want to go deeper into which regions we include for each country and see real‑world examples of this filter in action, read the dedicated article on how to filter companies by region.
Companies by Province
If regions already get a bit messy, provinces can be total chaos.
Depending on the country you may have provinces, counties, communities, municipalities, districts… or some combination of all of them.
As with regions, as far as possible we follow international standards to try to standardise the concept of province across countries.
For European countries, we define Company Province as the NUTS III level established by Eurostat. This level includes, for example, Provinces in Spain or Départements in France.
For more detail on which administrative units we treat as provinces in each country — and use cases for when it’s best to apply this filter — just read the dedicated article on how to filter companies by province
Companies by Postcode
Finally, postcodes tend to be unambiguous, as they are usually unique and officially defined by the Cadastre or the national postal service.
Where the data comes from
In general, the registered address (head office) of companies in a given country is included in the public database of that country’s Commercial Register.
Occasionally, to map the address into different geographic levels, we may need to rely on auxiliary databases — typically also public — such as the Cadastre or the Land Registry.
And when establishing equivalences between administrative units from different countries, we aim to follow international standards whenever possible. For example, the NUTS units defined by Eurostat, as explained above.
One important nuance
You may have seen a banner on our homepage saying that we respect your privacy.
We mean it.
At Atogu we do not monitor or track, in any way, the physical location of each employee of any company.
This means it is possible that you generate leads among companies headquartered in the Province of Málaga, and the person interested in your product or service is an employee of one of those companies — but located in Lugo, Soria, Murcia or Madrid.
This is because we use the company’s registered address to determine its geographic location. And while most employees are usually based at the headquarters, that does not necessarily mean 100% of the workforce must be physically located there.
So please bear in mind: while we can ensure the leads you generate belong to companies located in the geographies you set in your segmentation, it does not imply that the individuals who contact you about your product or service will necessarily be located there.