![]() Do your organic campaigns reach your target location? So, what is even the point of this information? How can this affect your business?Īlthough location data in Google Analytics is not accurate, it is still useful to answer 2 important questions about the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns. In all cases, do not blindly trust location data in GA. If you don't see anything at all, there may be a problem with your real time report. In the GA4 real time report, you can see none or all of the geographic location levels. You can choose and change the geographic dimension in many of the reports. ![]() Pro tip: If you connect BigQuery to GA4, you can also retrieve data on the level of continents and subcontinents. The more you zoom in, the higher the error rate. In GA4, you can dig 3 levels deep: country, region and town/city. The accuracy of a location depends on the scale you are using. To help you visualize this, I stole an image from an article by Jeff Sauer, founder of Data Driven U, about IP tracking in GA. GA collects IP addresses, but it anonymizes them so you don’t see them in GA. Luckily, reporting and collecting are two distinct steps of the whole process. It is also today’s world where privacy is becoming more important than ever.Īlthough you were not born with an IP address, that nerdy number with dots in between can reveal personal information about your whereabouts. That is not only a mouth full of acronyms. The GDPR considers an IP address as PII ( Personally Identifiable Information). Let’s dig deeper and get to the reason GA is still using technology that is bound to produce errors in location data. Give it a try and use Town/City as a secondary dimension. As a result, you can encounter “ not set location” in, for instance, the traffic acquisition report. Not all location data exists, or is updated live. This warning fits perfectly in the tradition of Google Analytics to not spend many words on explanations, such as why it is sunsetting UA. Google Analytics uses a 3rd party vendor to determine the location of users. But your actual IP address is XYZ and you are shopping in London. ![]() Simply put: GA gets the impression that your IP address is ABC, which is located in New York. What matters to you is that GA uses IP addresses to determine the location, but these can differ from the actual IP address of the user. I don’t want to steal your valuable time by going into details about how ISPs, cell towers, browsers and antivirus software assign, change and hide your IP address. In this simplified metaphor, the mail carrier needs to know where to deliver his bits and bytes package. To explain its purpose, an IP address is often compared with a physical address. There are basically 4 reasons these errors occur. The more you zoom in on a location (country, region, city), the higher the error percentage. Location data in Google Analytics is not 100% reliable. How accurate is Google Analytics location data?
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