Google Analytics data by State - messed up

[HoosierBuff]

HI All,

I have seen a new bug for a couple of clients this past month. For some clients I track their traffic by state (realizing it's imperfect data), just to understand it a bit better. At the end of June the data changed pretty significantly. . . suddenly there was a lot more traffic attributed to Illinois, NYC, and other states that normally didn't provide much traffic. This happened to at least 4 different clients in different verticals, some with a good amount of out of state traffic (due to blogs), and others with very little out of state traffic.

For most companies, I see about 70% of their traffic coming from their Home state . . . for the impacted clients, that changed to less than 50%, for one, as low as 38%.

The total amount of traffic did not change, where the traffic was said to be coming from did change.

Here is a chart of data from a lawnmower shop in Pensacola. This chart shows total site traffic from Illinois over time

I see this with many other sites.

From what I can tell, it appears to be impacting Mobile traffic, from IOS devices.

Is anyone else seeing this? Is this part of the change in cookie handling?

 

[Brian Barwig]

I've been noticing something similar for the past few months. Several of my clients have had out of state traffic explode for no reason I can tell. Several have had traffic increases from NY and WA state without being anywhere near those areas. I dug around GA/GSC/GMB but didnt find much as to why.

 

[HoosierBuff]

Yeah - the one thing I saw, it seems to be coming from people on IOS.