Like many other Shopify merchants, I like to check the Live View report at least a couple of times a day to see how many people are checking out.
And I noticed something strange, many times per day, our store was visited from the United States, specifically from Council Bluffs, Iowa, over hundreds of visits a day.
Why is it weird? Because our store is strictly for the Czech customers and doesn't have any content in English.
What is the United States, Iowa, Council Bluffs traffic
After some research, I found an old thread from 2020 at the Shopify Community asking the same question. And some of the users advised that the visits are actually Google bots testing the site speed, which is calculated in the Themes section.
This makes perfect sense. Not to mention Google actually has a data center in Council Bluffs, Iowa.
Core Web Vitals
These bots are accessing your store homepage heavily, several times a day, to calculate at least three metrics:
- LCP (Largest Contentful Paint): Measures loading speed based on how fast the largest element is loaded. A good score is below 2.5 ms.
- INP (Interaction to Next Paint): Measures how fast the page is responsive to user actions. A good score is below 200 ms.
- CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift): Measures how much the content "jumps" on the page when being loaded. A good score is 0.1.
Essentially, these metrics are also called the Core Web Vitals, and Google uses them as (one of many) ranking factors.
Why is it an issue: skewed analytics
Well, it's great to have an overview of your score every time you visit the Themes section or the dedicated Analytics report. The problem is that these bot sessions stay in the Shopify analytics data and may significantly skew your reports.
For example, session-based reports like Conversion rate over time or Sessions by landing page, will show impacted data because these bots don't convert and visit only the homepage.
In our case, the difference was ≈10% whether the bot traffic was included or excluded, but some merchants reported 75% traffic was from Council Bluffs, which makes some of the analytics reports heavily biased.
Conclusion: What you should do
The best thing to do is to adjust your reports using the ShopifyQL and filter out any traffic coming from Council Bluffs, Iowa. You can do this by simply adding this condition WHERE session_city != 'Council Bluffs' to the query or filter.
The perfect solution would be if Shopify could somehow filter out these sessions by default. I believe Google is doing that in Google Analytics 4 and automatically excluding known bot traffic.
