Question:
What progress has been made to update the “Traffic by Location” reports, especially given that VPNs significantly alter the accuracy of where users are shown to access your site?
Product:
Wix Studio
What are you trying to achieve:
I’m trying to get accurate information as to where my site visitors are physically located when they access my sites. However, Wix’s “Traffic by Location” reports simply show where the IP address is coming from, not the physical location of the user (the way Google Analytics does). Thus, if a site visitor uses a VPN, which nearly 40% of internet users do (Source: 2024 VPN Trends, Statistics, and Consumer Opinions | Security.org), the Wix Traffic by Location report shows the VPN location instead.
VPN usage also skews the “New vs. Returning Users” traffic report.
What have you already tried:
I’ve tried finding more information from Wix’s articles and Forums, but I’ve only found the following:
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From a Wix support article (Wix Analytics: About Your Traffic Reports | Help Center | Wix.com): “Note on location accuracy: We are working on improving the accuracy of traffic by location reports. In isolated cases, you may see inaccurate city names, or ‘N/A’ where the information from IP addresses is untrusted or unknown. Site traffic received through VPN, anonymizers, cloud providers, and bots can affect the accuracy of this data.”
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But, it looks like this information hasn’t been updated since at least August 2022 as shown in this Forum post: How to get visitor location?
Additional information:
Other than Traffic Acquisition Reports (which Wix calls “Traffic by Entry Page”), Traffic by Location is by far one of the MOST IMPORTANT site analytics metrics. At this point, Wix’s Traffic by Location report is practically useless if it can’t work past VPNs.
And keep in mind, the percentage of internet users using VPNs continues to grow, so this issue will only get larger over time.