Getting accurate Geo Location traffic stats in Google Analytics - HELP
-
One of our clients services the US and the UK, but having looked at the report over an extended period of time we can still see that the vast majority of traffic is coming from the US. I.e. our last report for March indicated that there were over 3,000 users in the US but only 6 in the UK.
We know that Google Analytics works out a user’s location based on where their IP is located and not their physical location, and that this means that the data needs to be taken with a pinch of salt as it won’t always represent what you expect.
That being said, we know that the traffic figures for Europe are largely inaccurate and would like to get some more accurate stats to report on. Is there a way to do so at all within Google Analytics?
-
I agree with Robin, I don't think there's a solid way to do what you want - or one that is infinitely superior to GA (which also doesn't damage conversion rates). IP addresses by and large, are sometimes inaccurate at the city / town level but they are 'usually' accurate at the national level. The only other option you have in GA is looking at browser language settings and that's incredibly misleading due to most PCs being shipped on US English by default
-
Hi there! Probably not the answer you were hoping for but, on the country level, I'd say GA's reported location is about as accurate as you'll get without asking users for their location (either automatically shared or self-reported). I don't think you'd want to be asking every user to share their location - it would probably demolish your conversion rate - so I don't think there's masses you can do there.
That said, how do you know the traffic figures for Europe are inaccurate? I don't think it's beyond the realms of possibility for a perfectly functional site to have 3K US visitors and 6 UK visitors even if both countries are being targeted. Do you know the figures are off because you are explicitly targeting ads at UK visitors and you can see the clicks but they get registered as US visitors in GA? As you specify that you think Europe in particular is inaccurate - is that because you are opting European visitors out of your site tracking?
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Problem to get multilingual posts indexed on Google
Last year on June I decided to make my site multi-lingual. The domain is: https://www.dailyblogprofits.com/ The main language English and I added Portuguese and a few posts on Spanish. What happened since then? I started losing traffic from Google and posts on Portuguese are not being indexed. I use WPML plugin to make it multi-lingual and I had Yoast installed. This week I uninstalled Yoast and when I type on google "site:site:dailyblogprofits.com/pt-br" I started seeing Google indexing images, but still not the missing posts. I have around 145 posts on Portuguese, but on Search Console it show only 57 hreflang tags. Any idea what is the problem? I'm willing to pay for an SEO Expert to resolve this problem to me.
International SEO | | Cleber0090 -
Redirection Question - Can Anyone Help?
Hi Community, I have 2 job boards. Job board A is a .co.uk domain. Job board B is uk.com domain. Job board A displays jobs in the UK but has an international jobs section. Job board B focuses entirely on international jobs. To cut a long story short we are shutting down Job board B as we are going to just be using Job board A in future. In terms of redirection, would it be best to: 1. 301 redirect job board B domain to Job board A. (www.jobboardb.uk.com -> www.jobboarda.co.uk) or 2. 301 redirect job board b to the international jobs section on job board a (as this is the most relevant place for the user to go I am thinking to go with option 2, but I read somewhere that it wasn't best practice. Any help is much appreciated.
International SEO | | SO_UK0 -
HELP: Incorrect Meta Tag description showing for the wrong search results
Hi Guys I'm stuck here! I have update the hreftags, updated the sitemaps. I have 3 top level domains and my zenory.com site is showing for the home page the wrong meta tag description, as you can see in the attachement the meta tag is showing the new zealand site meta tag description which is for zenory.co.nz Anyone know what might be going on here? I have also fetched the home page through WMT as well and its still returning the same results any advice would be much appreciated! Thanks
International SEO | | edward-may0 -
Is there any reason to get a massive decrease on indexed pages?
Hi, I'm helping on SEO for a big e-commerce in LatAm and one thing we've experienced during the last months is that our search traffic had reduced and the indexed pages had decreased in a terrible way. The site had over 2 Million indexed pages (which was way too much, since we believe that around 10k would be more than enough to hold the over 6K SKUs) but now this number has decreased to less than 3K in less than 2 months. I've also noticed that most of the results in which the site is still appearing are .pdf or .doc files but not actual content on the website. I've checked the following: Robots (there is no block, you can see that on the image as well) Webmaster Tools Penalties Duplicated content I don't know where else to look for. Can anyone help? Thanks in advance! cpLwX1X
International SEO | | mat-relevance0 -
Does Google's algorithm work the same in every country?
I can't help but feel this is a silly question! but does Google algorithm work exactly the same throughout all countries? I run a few sites in the UK and a couple in Spain but can't help but feel that my Spanish sites are harder to rank for. The sites that rank the best are business directories in Spain... whereas here in the UK you'd be lucky to find one on page one..
International SEO | | david.smith.segarra0 -
Country Specific Google Results
Does anyone have any stats (preferred) on users selecting Google results segmented to their country? For instance, users in the UK (France, Japan, etc.) selecting the "Pages from the UK" option to limit results to country based sites? Or if not hard stats, at least any international users care to comment? Cheers, Brian ~identity
International SEO | | identity0 -
Google Indexing Part two
Hi Everybody, I am trying to understand how does Google works, so I ve been reading and researching a lot. But I am still having a problem that I cannot solve. My website is in several languages, but its main language is Catalan. so if you get into my webite: "www.vallnord.com" the default language will be catalan. but if someone using Google.es in Spanish I would like the spanish version of the web to be the main result not the catalan. unfortunately this does not work like this. For a search query like "Esqui Andorra" the catalan version is on the 1st page and the spanish (www.vallnord.com/es) is on the 4th page. Does anybody know why is this happening or how can I solve it? Regards.
International SEO | | SilbertAd0 -
How do you submit US based news on Google News US from the UK?
How do you go about submitting US news (based in the UK) to get indexed on Google News and show up in the US rather then the UK?
International SEO | | CameronT0