In the last 90 days, only 2 out of 7 top cities by user are local. Two of the cities are in a different countries and two are in different states. Ashburn is the top city by a significant amount (233k) and it is no where near the NWTC campus. What is causing people from another state to visit a local college website at such a high rate?
Ashburn, VA is home to major data centers (Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud). It commonly shows up in analytics as bots, crawlers and VPN traffic.
My recommendations are as followed.
Segment out Ashburn
Create a comparison of all users and users excluding Ashburn.
If your following metrics improve dramatically without Ashburn:
- Engagement rate
- Time spent on site
- Conversion rate
That confirms inaccurate information due to non-human traffic.
Create a “Local Audience” view or comparison
Segment by:
- State
- County
- Radius around campus
Use this segment to evaluate admissions pages and application intent.
When reviewing success, default to local data first.
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