Analytics seems to be classifying country traffic differently to all other analytic tools

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#1

Hi Team,

We’ve just enabled netlify analytics on one of our sites - https://www.knapsac.com, it’s finished now parsing all the analytic data but it seems to show that a huge proportion of the traffic is originating from the United States, which is unexpected and different to what our other analytic tools are showing. Could you advise how you determine the source location of a user, and why there could be this discrepancy?

Thanks

Data for the same period:
Netlify: 75% US / 13%UK
Google Analytics: 6% US / 72% UK
Facebook ad targeting: 100% UK (i.e we expect the majority of traffic to be UK based)

#2

Seems likely this is due to us counting bot data, and google not. Most of the social/scraping services - e.g. slack, facebook, twitter - are US based, and their data centers generally scrape from the US and are identified as such.

Do you also see a pretty big discrepancy in pageviews between us and GA? If not, then I have likely misdiagnosed. IF so, I bet those views are the bots, coming from the US.

Let me know what you think!

#3

Quite possibly it could be the issue, Netlify is showing 20% more unique visitors than GA. Naturally with the rise in GA being blocked we’d expect Netlify to see more, but 20% is hard to judge if that’s high or not. I wouldn’t expect the site to be scraped that much either, it’s not popular, and content is not changing much.

If bots are the issue, are there plans to filter these out as part of the analytics offering? Without, analytics seems a little useless, as we don’t really care where that traffic is coming from.

/edit corrected numbers when I got the correct ones from GA

#4

Hi @orangejellyfish - Analytics is definitely still under development, and there are plans to provide a more granular breakdown, I believe. I don’t have a specific ETA for those changes, but I am happy to circle back here once there is news to share!