I’ve had 100 website visits fr council bluff Iowa. It is messing up my analytics. Yesterday it was 50. Does any one know the cause of this?
Topic summary
Store owners are experiencing unusually high website traffic from Council Bluffs, Iowa—ranging from 3 to 100+ daily visits—that distorts their analytics and inflates metrics for paid services like Trusted Site.
Root Cause:
Shopify representatives confirm this traffic originates from Google’s data center in Council Bluffs, used for speed testing, indexing, and routing Google services (search, Chrome data-saving). The visits don’t represent actual customers but automated crawling by Shopify/Google systems. Some users report increased activity after theme updates (e.g., Dawn 15.3).
Workarounds Provided:
- Filter Analytics Reports: Create custom reports excluding Council Bluffs by setting “Session City” to “is not Council Bluffs” and replacing default dashboard reports
- SQL Queries: Use custom SQL filters to exclude Council Bluffs (and other bot hubs like Ashburn, Boardman) from session counts and bounce rate calculations
Ongoing Issues:
- Shopify support inconsistently acknowledges the problem; some agents deny it’s speed testing
- No official fix exists to prevent these visits from being counted
- The issue has persisted since at least 2020 with no resolution
The discussion remains open as users seek better solutions beyond manual filtering.
5 Likes
in Iowa people have a lot of time on their hands.
Seriously, it’s Shopify speed test. Here’s your answer. https://community.shopify.com/c/shopify-discussions/council-bluffs-visits/td-p/846963
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I read that and it says most people are only getting 3 visits a day. Im getting 100 website visits. im a small business so its really messing up my analytics
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if you dig into the original report https://community.shopify.com/c/shopify-discussions/council-bluffs-visits/m-p/953848#M209517 you will see others also experiencing the same figures as you. And like those people Shopify won’t do anything to help you. I mean that goes back to 2020 when Shopify actually had customer support, these days all most of us get are chatbots when we reach out.
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Hi !
I now have this issue and it’s really anoying. The bot generates preview links of my different themes, even the ones I never published. Did you have the same URLs in your reports ?
Similar issue here - and these visits get counted for sites like Trusted site etc., which we end up paying for. Any idea how to restrict this?
Speaking to a shopify rep and they typed this: upon checking my resources here. The presence of Council Bluffs, IA in the traffic reports could indicate that there is traffic coming from a data center located in Council Bluffs. This is a known behavior and is not indicative of actual visitors from that location. Technically speaking.. When you see a visit from Council Bluffs in your analytics, it doesn’t necessarily mean that a person in Council Bluffs visited your site. Instead, it could mean that someone used a Google service (like Google search or Chrome’s data-saving feature) to access your site, and their traffic was routed through the Council Bluffs data center.
The agent also typed: When you see traffic coming from Council Bluffs, IA in your analytics, it doesn’t necessarily mean the visitors are physically located in Council Bluffs or even in Iowa. The traffic could be coming from anywhere in the United States or even globally.
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If you’re seeing visits from Council Bluffs in your Shopify analytics (likely from Shopify’s speed testing using Google Developer tools), here’s how to exclude them:
- Go to the Analytics menu in Shopify, and you will see the dashboard with your reports.
- Select any report that includes visits (e.g., Sessions over time, Sessions by location).
- Apply a filter: Set Session City to “is not” Council Bluffs.
- Save the report with a new name (e.g., “Sessions over time (No Council Bluffs)”).
- Replace the original report on the dashboard with the new filtered version to view accurate data.
Repeat this for all relevant reports, such as sessions, conversions, or landing pages. Leave sales-related reports unchanged. Your dashboard will now display only real-user sessions without the Council Bluffs data.
4 Likes
Thank you for the step by step instructions. I am not running ads and have a significant amount of traffic for no ads. It’s all coming from Council Bluffs, I happen to update my theme to Dawn 15.3 today so I wonder if that is causing the uptick from that location. I was able to create the report to exlude Council Bluffs but can you clarify step 5 above, “replace the original report on dashboard” - the anyalytics dashboard or “home” screen view? Can these “session by location/session by referrer” be replaced / exclude council bluffs, if so how do you do that?
2 Likes
I remember when they had great customer support…these days not so much.
looks familiar
Well this explains a lot. I was worried about bots.
So, it looks like the issue is a mix of Shopify and Google data centres, crawling either for indexing or to compare store speeds. That’s why some see 3 visits and others 100+.
Whilst it can’t help bounce rate, you can edit the SQL filter to make sure you have a custom report that shows site visits by location but with the exclusion of Council Bluffs. Example below:
FROM sessions
SHOW online_store_visitors, sessions
WHERE session_city != ‘Council Bluffs’
AND session_country IS NOT NULL
GROUP BY session_country, session_region, session_city WITH TOTALS
DURING today
ORDER BY sessions DESC
LIMIT 1000
VISUALIZE sessions TYPE horizontal_bar
Hopefully this helps see some genuine results. You can also do something similar with your bounce rate, to see a true bounce rate (or at least, closer to true) :
FROM sessions
SHOW bounce_rate
WHERE session_city != ‘Council Bluffs’ AND session_city IS NOT NULL
GROUP BY session_city
SINCE startOfDay(-1d) UNTIL today
ORDER BY bounce_rate DESC
LIMIT 100
VISUALIZE bounce_rate TYPE horizontal_bar
There are some well known bot hubs such as Ashburn and Boardman as well, simply add those in to the same query with “AND session_city != ‘Ashburn’ AND
session_city != ‘Boardman’”
Hello, I’ve been experience many views from CB as well. I’m trying to understand if it’s something to disregard because it’s Shopify/Google doing some type of speed testing? If so then why don’t their agents know this? I was on tech support for almost 30 minutes, the agent kept on saying not to be concerned, never mentioned speed testing. So my question to all of i you is, “should one not be concerned about so much activity from Council Bluffs, Iowa?”