Google Analytics and Location Data Accuracy

In the Publishers Roundtable meeting held last week the topic came up of using Location Data in Google Analytics. Jeff showed the charts and reports that seemed to indicate that nearly all the traffic for member websites come from larger centers, not neighbouring communities. Publishers in the chat room related similar results – how they might look up their own IP address and it wouldn’t match their community.

We did have a post here in KUTD about this a few years back, and perhaps it was time to review the information again as AdCanada reports of customers that think community traffic numbers exist. These numbers don’t really – by Province, yes but by Community, no, not reliably.

Why not?

Google Analytics only uses a site visitor’s IP address to estimate location. It turns that into a location by referencing third-party databases maintained by internet service providers (ISP). The accuracy of those estimates varies from company to company and can depend on how big they are, how they assign their addresses, how often they add more addresses to the pool, how often they reassign numbers etc.

We can all look up our own IP address and find it is often incorrect. Google Analytics has the same data source.

The accepted estimates generally seem to be reported as:
Country level = 95-99% accurate
Region/Province level = 55-80% accurate
Cities – 50-75% accurate

But then how does online advertising find you so well?

Google Ads and Google Analytics don’t use the same methods for locating/counting site visitors.  The privacy policies that restrict what Analytics can access and then report, also allows ad targeting to use more data, more tools to determine visitor’s location. Google Ads (and other programatic advertising companies, Facebook etc.) might have access to things like cookies already on your computer, mobile device GPS coordinates, or cell tower locations.

This database is not reflected in Google Analytics Location Data.

Some interesting reads for more info:
https://www.417marketing.com/how-accurate-is-location-data-in-google-analytics/
https://www.jmillermarketing.com/insights/2018/errors-in-google-analytics-user-location-data
https://www.avast.com/c-what-is-ad-tracking#topic-4