Analytics Thinks Your Customers Are in Vancouver

Vancouver, says the report

An owner in Langley opens Analytics, goes to the location report and clicks through Canada to British Columbia. Vancouver is at the top. Burnaby is second.

Langley, where the business is and most of its customers live, sits further down the list, below Surrey and a line that simply says (not set).

A few visits are even credited to Toronto and Calgary, though the business has no customers in either.

The tempting conclusion is that the customers are in Vancouver and the advertising should follow them. It is usually wrong.

How Analytics guesses a location

Analytics does not know where a visitor is. It looks up the visitor's internet address in a database that links blocks of addresses to places.

That database knows which provider owns an address and where the provider registers it, which is often the provider's hub rather than the house at the end of the line.

Home connections in the suburbs are often listed under the city where the provider's equipment sits. Phones on mobile data are worse, since carriers route traffic through a few central points, sometimes in another province.

Office networks appear wherever the company's connection meets the internet, which may be head office in another city.

None of this is a fault in Analytics. It is the best guess an address allows, presented with more confidence than it deserves.

What the location report can tell you

• Country is usually right, and useful for spotting foreign spam.
• Province is mostly right, apart from some phones.
• The metro area is roughly right.
• The city within the Lower Mainland is often wrong.
• The neighbourhood is not available at all.

The fourth is where suburban businesses go wrong, because the difference between Vancouver and Langley is the whole question they are asking.

Decisions it misleads

Advertising areas, first. An AdWords or Facebook campaign aimed at the cities in the report spends its money where the customers are not.

Pages for particular towns, next. A business that writes pages for Vancouver neighbourhoods because the report says so is writing for the wrong readers.

The same goes for flyers, local sponsorships and directory listings. Where you spend locally should follow where customers live.

And larger decisions, such as where a second location or a new service area should go, deserve better evidence than an address lookup.

A worked example

A two-vet equine practice based in Langley drives to barns all over the valley, from Abbotsford to Maple Ridge. Horse owners use its website mostly for the emergency number, vaccination reminders and an article on colic.

Analytics showed Vancouver as the top city by a wide margin, with Burnaby second. Planning a small AdWords campaign, the practice nearly aimed it at Vancouver.

The report could not be right. There are very few horses in the city of Vancouver.

The practice's clients live on acreages and farms, using rural internet services and mobile data, and their addresses were being looked up as the providers' hubs.

The receptionist exported the billing addresses from the practice software and counted clients by the first three characters of their postal codes. The result matched what the vets already knew from their mileage.

The campaign went to those areas instead. The website gained a page listing the communities the practice covers, and the contact form gained an optional field asking where the horse is kept.

Your own records are the best map

Invoices, job sheets, delivery addresses and booking records already say where customers are. Most businesses have years of them.

The first three characters of a Canadian postal code identify an area, from part of a city neighbourhood to a wide rural district.

Counting customers by those three characters in a spreadsheet gives a map good enough for any marketing decision. It needs only the prefix, not names or street addresses, so nothing personal leaves the office.

The same count shows distance as well: how far customers already travel to you, or how far your vans already go.

Ask the people who contact you

Add an optional field to the contact form asking where the job is or which town the customer is in. Most people answer a short, sensible question.

Ask callers too, and keep a tally by the phone for a month. It costs nothing, and it is accurate in a way no report can be.

Online booking and checkout forms often collect a postal code already. That is the same information, waiting to be counted.

Google My Business Insights also show where people asked for driving directions from, which is a rough map of where visitors set out.

AdWords sees a little more

AdWords works out where a searcher is from more than the internet address, and can use a phone's own location where the phone shares it.

Its reports on where ads were shown are a better guide than the Analytics city list. They are still not exact, and they cover only the people who saw your ads.

Use the report for what it does well

The country view is good at spotting spam. A burst of visits from a country you have never sold to, with no time spent on the site, is usually bots.

Trends within the report still mean something. If visits credited to valley cities climb after a campaign there, something changed, even if the city names are off.

And visits to a page about a particular town show interest in that town, wherever the visitor's address appears to be.

The counter-case

For some businesses the report is close enough. A shop shipping across Canada needs provinces and countries, which it gets mostly right.

A business in central Vancouver whose customers really are in Vancouver will find the city list roughly matches its invoices.

For a business in the suburbs or the valley, though, the city list is a poor guide. Use your own records, and ask the people who contact you.

Drawing the real map

1. Treat the city report as a rough guess.
2. Export last year's customer addresses from your records.
3. Count them by postal code prefix.
4. Add an optional town field to the contact form.
5. Ask callers where the job is.
6. Check where directions requests come from.
7. Set advertising areas from the real map.

Step three turns records you already have into the map you wanted from Analytics. It takes an afternoon, and it does not depend on anybody's internet provider.

Cleaning the visit counts themselves before reading any report is covered in bot visits counted as customers.

Frequently asked questions

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