How accurate is the user location data?
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Wondering how accurate the location data is for users? we are seeing a lot of users from Chicago which seems a little odd for our site, but may be right. Any reason why Chicago locations in particular might be skewed?
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Hey @jzieg sometimes we see in our clients’ FullStory instances concentrations of users, but they are actually bots/servers. You may want to look for things like “headless” in the User Agent view or other give-aways.
Or look at users in Chicago that click nothing – that might give a signal for that too.
Oh! And one other thought – we had a client that had a lot of sessions from a particular city at the same time of day and it turned out to be a synthetic monitoring service.
Anyway, hopefully giving you food for thought on why you might have a concentration of sessions (that they might not be real users!).
Thanks so much for your reply! These are actual bookings on our site, so they are definitely doing something real :) I’ll keep looking to see if I can figure out what that’s all about, thanks!
Hey @jzieg! Thanks so much for chatting in, and thank you @stevenshyne for sharing that valuable insight! 😄 It’s true that sometimes bots can affect the user location data.
There are a few other options you could consider to determine the larger user numbers in Chicago, such as whether you’ve recently released a marketing campaign targeting folks in that area. If that doesn’t resonate, it could come down to VPN’s. In a nutshell, we capture the IP Address of the end user when the session begins, and from there, the geolocation of the user is populated. Since a VPN replaces a user's IP address, we would likely show a different location than where the user is actually located.
Please let me know if you have any other thoughts or questions!
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