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I've run into an issue where some of my clients are seeing large amounts of users in Analytics from outside of their markets. They only serve their local areas, so there should be a minimal amount of traffic from outside of them. I know that geolocation isn't 100% reliable, but these numbers are too far off to be categorized as simply being misidentified. Here are the important details: Over 48% of the traffic is listed as coming from outside of the state 62.77% of traffic is mobile, 28.95% desktop, and 9.28% tablet Of that, 23.73% is coming from an adjacent state, and of that, 82.41% is coming from one city - which is over 200 miles from the target city Several other clients that we manage also show large amounts of traffic coming from this same city, outside of their state or market The bounce rate from the target state is 52.82% - the bounce rate from the adjacent state is 67.41% Goal conversion rate is 19.43% in target state, 13.73% in adjacent state, and 15.79% in a far distant state - other states vary dramatically Analytics reports source/medium as primarily being facebook/cpc and google/cpc for out of state traffic, but both are set to only show ads to people in target state AdWords reports zero traffic from outside of target state, even though I can see the exact AdWords campaigns IDs in Analytics which tells me the traffic came from out of state Some Ad Groups listed in Analytics out of state traffic reports show zero clicks in AdWords I have spent a ton of time on the phone with AdWords support and they are giving me the runaround. They clearly know there is an issue, but keep saying that the data is accurate and that sometimes things are misidentified. They have no explanation for why so much traffic from CPC sources is being classified as out of state or why the AdWords and Analytics data aren't even close to matching. TLDR: Google Analytics shows thousands of users coming from paid sources outside of our target state; AdWords shows zero. Help appreciated!

Back in the middle of August we noticed a significant drop in organic traffic from Google for one of our clients. They had been averaging around 125 sessions per day but after that date it dropped to 50-60 per day. Their WordPress website has been kept updated but no changes to content were applied. No significant changes occurred in the marketplace, and this is not a seasonal drop. It came several weeks before the Possum and Penguin 4.0 updates, so we ruled them out. The only change we can confirm was that their Google My Business listing was claimed and setup on or around the day the traffic dropped off a cliff. Their listing is setup properly, as far as we can tell, and links to their website. I can't find any indication of why this would affect traffic in such a negative way and it hasn't recovered since. It's stable now, but still half of what they had before. It's down across the board, too. Mobile, desktop, geographically, new vs returning. Everything. Would love to hear your thoughts!