Hi everyone,
We’ve launched a Shopify store targeted at the Turkish market, and almost all of our real customers are located in Turkey. However, in the Shopify Admin > Analytics > Sessions by Location panel, the majority of traffic is showing up as coming from Council Bluffs, Iowa (United States) – sometimes even more than actual Turkish sessions.
We’ve already ensured that:
Cookie settings are correctly implemented (necessary/marketing/statistics cookies are managed)
No third-party proxy (like Cloudflare’s orange cloud) is used
Most of the IPs belong to Google Cloud infrastructure
After researching, we suspect this may be caused by Shopify’s automatic speed tests using Google Lighthouse from the Iowa region. If that’s the case, this is significantly skewing our reports, especially because our traffic volume is still low. It affects session counts, location-based reporting, and conversion rates.
Questions:
Can Shopify disable or reduce the frequency of these internal bot visits per store upon request?
Is there a way to exclude this traffic from Shopify’s built-in analytics (or at least flag it)?
Is there any roadmap to provide filters or segmentation for such internal traffic in the analytics panel?
Thanks in advance — this would help improve reporting accuracy for small-scale stores like ours.
You’re correct – that Council Bluffs, Iowa traffic is generally from automated activity (including performance metric tracking for different services).
I can’t share too much internal information, but for some context that I can share, Google Cloud Platform is the primary hosting solution used at Shopify (a bit more info here). Google Cloud has multiple service regions and within these regions each data centre is broken up into zones for local backup and restoration. Council Bluffs, Iowa has one of the Google data centres used by us here at Shopify.
You are correct that this is likely related to our performance reports. We do run speed reports daily and it’s likely those actions are triggered by automations that “live” on the Iowa servers.
Three pages are generally tested in these reports - the homepage, a collection page, and a product page. At the moment, this action can’t be disabled or stopped.
The main purpose of these tests is mainly internal on our end to ensure that everything is working optimally within our infrastructure, and is not a typical “site speed test” to determine how your store compares to similar stores on the platform if that makes sense.
I definitely understand how this isn’t ideal though, and there is a way to mitigate this slightly when creating reports. Here’s a quick step by step I can share in case it helps:
Go to the report: [Sessions by location]
Click the “+” button near the bottom right of the page in the “Filter” box and select “session city”:
