Why does Google Analytics show your campaign delivered clicks from the wrong geography? Observations I've made about mobile website traffic.

As the programmatic advertising world evolves more quickly than we can keep up with, clients are becoming seemingly more and more inquisitive. With that comes, more measurement, more KPIs, more attribution, and more time spent validating your campaign! While it’s our responsibility to direct clients to realistic measurement goals, some things they bring up are unavoidable. Not a week goes by where I don’t field a question or two related to something a client is seeing in their Google Analytics. In an effort to avoid common pitfalls I’ve seen come up with GA, I have a topic I want to cover today, the geography tracking in GA for mobile website traffic. If you are selling programmatic digital campaigns and haven't had this question come up from a client, consider yourself lucky. It will come up eventually.

So GA's accuracy in measuring the geography someone came from can be wildly inconsistent, especially on mobile. I have personally experienced errors with this. I’ve had clients look at the traffic we sent to their website and the geos don’t match with what was ordered. This can quickly put you on the defense as to is your campaign running as ordered...and in most cases, YES it is. The problem isn’t your campaign, the problem is your cell phone provider reporting where the device is and that not communicating with GA accurately. 

Let me illustrate more on that point. When you are on WiFi the location of your internet service provider is what will report in GA sometimes, even if it is far away from where the website visitor actually came from. Ideally and most often it should report to where YOUR router is located, but it doesn’t always do that. That can raise questions from a client. The bigger issue I see is reporting from the cellular network. I’ve personally tested and witnessed this error, here's my experience. I live in the Denver area and when I’m on my home WiFi the geo attribution in GA reports accurately. When I turn off my WiFi and use my cell provider's network and go to the same website, it shows I’m a visitor from the Texas area. Why Texas? I’m not entirely sure, maybe because that's where AT&T (my cell provider) is headquartered with their servers, so GA is picking up that as my location? I cannot find much research on this topic and would love to hear from anyone who has insight into that. However, with all of this my GPS on my phone does place me in the right location when on WiFi or my cell provider’s network.

So the big question some are thinking, are my client's ads actually being delivered in the right area? YES. Most exchanges deliver ads based on the cookie level data on a device or the GPS of the phone and where it’s located, which is most often accurate. So rest assured your ad is being delivered in the right area…even if GA says it isn’t! If you need to validate this to the client, pull a latitude/longitude report of where your ads were delivered if you can get that from the exchanges you used. 

For some additional resources I’ve recently written pertaining to campaign measurement and GA, here are two articles I’ve written about clicks not matching sessions, and high bounce rates, and why not to fear them. Those are two other common questions I experience.

If you experience other questions or challenges that come up, please share them with them me! I’d love to hear from my peers so we can all become better prepared on how to help our clients.