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Why is Council Bluffs frequently visiting my Shopify site?

pixidaisy
Tourist
8 0 23

Hi all

on a daily basis we are getting 3 visits from this city in the US and this  has been happening over a couple of months.  I have tried to figure out what organisation is out there with no success and wondered whether anyone else has witnessed the same ?

Accepted Solutions (2)
TheDigitalYeti
Shopify Partner
12 2 56

This is an accepted solution.

Hi,

I have been doing some research and found out the cause, the Shopify Speed Report. You can find the topic here; https://community.shopify.com/c/Online-Store-Speed/Online-Store-Speed-Report/m-p/908894#M390

Shopify runs the speed report using a Google Developer tool (the Google data centre is based in Council Bluffs, USA) which tests 3 pages, Homepage, a popular collection page and a popular product page. Shopify then compares this result to other similar Shopify sites. This test is run daily!

For some sites this is not a problem, but for some smaller sites this can screw with your analytics and conversion rate metrics. If you get 3000 hits a day, 3 extra visits is not an issue - it's only 0.1%. Not every site is as big as that. My site is small and got tested twice today (15th Nov) for some reason. If you use Google Analytics you can exclude these visits from the report. I do not trust Google with my data as I have caught them doing things with my data before, and these visits are messing with the analytics in Shopify.

So if this feature is negatively affecting you, make sure to reach out to Shopify and ask them to turn it off.

Better yet ask them to give you, the store owner, the choice of when or if your site is tested. Manually, Daily, Weekly, Monthly or Annually.

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Linden
Visitor
1 1 2

This is an accepted solution.

Same issue as the rest of you. My store has 524 visits from Council Bluffs in the last month. Ridiculous. I'm a first time Spotify user and am really disappointed with this aspect of their service. My analytics are more difficult to use with this, having to constantly account for these useless visits. 

 

There needs to be a way to exclude Google's IPs (especially those from Council Bluffs) to prevent their bot visits from skewing our data. Time to start hitting Spotify's feedback about this.

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