• Stop being a LURKER - join our dealer community and get involved. Sign up and start a conversation.

Google Analytics weirdness

John Robling

Full Sticker
Nov 10, 2015
14
1
First Name
John
Hello again,

About a week ago we started seeing some weirdness with our Google Analytics (GA) tracking.
Anywhere between 20-35% of our traffic is showing up as coming from Virginia.
It doesn't matter the source: internal emails, conquest, search, banners - GA is showing our traffic as coming from VA. And of course we are not in VA. So after hollering at everyone for about a week our IT guys started digging a bit deeper. We pulled the server logs and did a lookup on the IP addresses from our traffic - across every channel. NONE of the IP's were from VA.

Our IT guys think this may be one of two things:
1. An issue with a second tier mobile carrier whose traffic is routing through a server farm in VA.
2. These are AOL users whose traffic is routing through an AOL server in Reston, VA (AOL HQ).​

I have spoken to local friends with dealerships and also in Texas and California who are seeing the same things. We have reached out to Google Analytics support with absolutely no success.

Has anyone else seen something similar?

Thanks again to the DealerRefresh community!

J.R.
 
I have seen this before.
I'd guess the traffic has a conversion rate of 0% from this traffic. It could be several things:

Its' a spammer or spider that's hitting your site and it happens to be able to execute your Google Analytics tag. In this case, it will probably stop within a few days. Some companies you hire to do SEO or some other digital marketing services will also do this to make it seem like whatever they are doing is working.

Its' a spammer that wants website owners/operators to go to some website. In this case, the traffic will be referrer traffic and they are hitting the Google Analytics API to make it seem like you're getting traffic when you're actually not. This is what it sounds like it is since you don't see the traffic in your server logs. Just google "google analytics ghost spam" for a more detailed description along with ways to stop it.

Hope that helps!

-Carl
 
thanks Carl - thats close but not exactly what we are seeing.
We ARE seeing the traffic on our logs - AND the traffic is mapping back to IP's that are in our GEO.
The problem we are finding is that somehow GA is binding the location of these clicks to a VA server.
The traffic is going through adn hitting our servers - and the traffic is coming to us - its just this weird GA thing.
 
Ok. This sounds like its' probably valid traffic.
The server gets their location data from the IP address.
Google, on the other hand, gets their data from a variety of sources, including the location of the user's Google account.
This could account for the discrepancy but I don't think there's any way to know for sure.
Also, AOL has a proxy service that masks the user's info so if you are getting the location data from the IP address, the actual user's information could be incorrect.
 
Google Analytics and tag-based analytics tools suck and tend to be very incomplete. Rather, use Passive Data Capture tools performed through a tap packet sniffing, not tags (which are insecure and a liability).

A friend of mine sold his company Metronome to IBM and it's become what is known as Tea Leaf @ http://www-01.ibm.com/software/info/tealeaf.
G4mzWHq.png