Google Analytics reports large amounts of out of state traffic

[unitednetworks]

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!

[unitednetworks]

The majority of the out of state mobile traffic has the Network Domain listed as (not set), but most of the data is shown as coming from large cities within the out of state locations.

Google said: We also take different factors into account in AdWords (e.g. mobiles can use various signals, such as GPS, etc.), while Analytics strictly uses IP, which can be very different from actual location.

Even so, I'm with you; 48% is bananas and there is no way it can be that far off...at least, I hope not. We did check order and phone call reporting data and we only have a few customers coming in from outside of our market; nowhere near the volume Google Analytics suggests we should be seeing.

[DFrey]

I've seen some funky discrepancies with geo, but never in the 48% range.

It looks like you've already double checked to ensure your AdWords campaigns are only targeting people who are inside your targeted area and not people who are also interested in your targeted area.

If the traffic was all mobile, I'd say it could be an ISP issue. Have you segmented your data by Service Provider to see if the majority of the traffic coming from the out-of-state city is from a single ISP? Often mobile devices have IP addresses from large cities such as Chicago, Atlanta, etc. Maybe AdWords and Google Analytics don't always use the same data to determine location and AdWords could be using something more accurate such as GPS or search history while GA is using IP?

Your out-of-state traffic is still converting, which (hopefully) suggests it's not non-human traffic. Is your client getting phone calls from this other state as well? This would confirm humans are actually interacting with the ads and that the ads are serving out-of-state...