Why is part of our traffic reported from Germany or the Netherlands?

The report records where the traffic leaves the network, and VPN or proxy servers are commonly hosted in those countries. To verify, put browser language, checkout currency, delivery address and the hourly visit pattern next to that row; if they all match the domestic market and time zone, the row is not a foreign audience.

Can city accuracy be improved?

Not from the analytics side, because the source is the IP address and the limit is structural. The only accurate source is data the user supplies: a city chosen in a form, a delivery address on an order, or a selected branch. Read the geographic dimension as context, not as a decision input.

Country / City

Beginner

Updated Jul 11, 2026 Shahin editorial 2 min read

PronunciationEN/ˈkʌntri ˈsɪti/

Country and city are the paired geographic dimensions of web reports; they place each visit from the visitor's IP address rather than from the device's location sensor.

Both dimensions come from looking the IP address up in a location database, so their accuracy is not equal: country detection is generally dependable while city detection is far shakier. Two forces distort the city rows. Mobile operators route the traffic of many provinces through a small number of gateways, which piles visits artificially onto the gateway's city, and VPN or proxy use relocates the visitor to another country entirely. On Iranian sites these two effects together inflate the share of Tehran and push part of the domestic traffic under Germany, the Netherlands and the United States. The common wrong conclusion is reading the city rows as a map of demand and allocating local advertising budget against them.

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