Hi,
I have had almost 1000 shopping sessions this morning on my website. Im trying to understand why 200 of them are from “Forest City, North Carolina”?
I don’t imagine it’s the same person, consistently coming back to my site this many times during the early hours of the morning. Nor do I believe 200 individual customers from Forest City have visited me this morning?
So, what am I looking at with this stat? Can someone shed some light and help me understand the data better?
Thank you
OK well Forest City is a data hub so most likely it’s not real visitors.
Same with Ashburn and Council Bluffs.
They are bots. Testing bots, search engine crawling bots, ad crawling bots.
leaving breadcrumbs: https://community.shopify.com/search?q=suspicious+sessions → bots
Hi there @Urbanvybe it’s most likely from bots (which may be harmful or not) so you can’t read too much into it. If you have any issue with how much it’s skewing the data, then I recommend using a location blocker to prevent traffic from coming from that area into your store.
Hello @Urbanvybe you actually can customize your analytics dashboard by filtering out cities like Ashburn and Council Bluffs, as well as filtering out all bot traffic. That way, each time you return to your analytics, you get a more accurate and clean picture of your ‘real’ data.
@Urbanvybe If i may ask where did you targeted for your store Audience
I would never turn down some free help 
Print on demand t-shirts - mental health niche
USA but now brought in UK
@Olivia_grace Olivia_grace what about you?
Forest City (and Ashburn, Prineville, Council Bluffs) are data-center hubs, that’s where AWS, Google Cloud, and similar host servers. So a cluster of sessions ““from”” there is almost always automated traffic or VPN exit nodes, not 200 real shoppers in small-town North Carolina.
Gut check: look at whether those sessions have a 100% bounce, near-zero duration, and no conversions. If so, they’re bots/monitoring and not worth worrying about as customers, the only real harm is skewed analytics.
Two practical moves:
Turn on GA4’s known-bot filtering and, if you want cleaner Shopify numbers, segment these out so your conversion rate reflects real visitors.
If the volume is genuinely disruptive and tied to identifiable ranges, a blocker that works on IP/data-center ranges (Blockify and others can block by IP/range and VPN) will trim it, just don’t block the whole region, since some real VPN users legitimately surface from these hubs too.