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City Location Accuracy

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Level 3

Hi all-

I am hoping I can get some suggestions or answers on the acuracy of location data within Adobe.  

Background:

We are running some local campaigns targeting display ads to geo's around the Pittsburgh PA area.  The agency running the campaigns is claiming that they are only targeting that area and surrounding areas (Facebook ads, Pandora, CPC Display, retargeting, etc).  However, when looking at my Adobe data, the majority of the city traffic for these particular campaigns is from area's WAY outside the target area (California, Florida, New York, Georgia, Virgina, etc).  We do capture IP address in a variable to help with these type of investigations.  What is am seeing is that large blocks of the IP addresses are showing under these locations, a lot of which have a search engine as the registered IP provider.  Doing a reverse look up didn't get me anywhere because iplocation.net shows 15 different DB's for the IP and I sometimes get 6-7 different locations (not even in the same state).  They do not appear to be bot traffic because the visits do happen over the course of a few weeks to a month, but the tight groups of IP ranges lead me to believe something isn't right.  

Here's a screenshot of some of the data:  https://farm4.staticflickr.com/3929/32859822864_56f5a63cd7_o.png

The issue is that one of the internal clients wants their report at the city level to see how things are performing, but this report has opened a can of worms and caused a lot of issues.  I have reached out to Clientcare, but am not getting any answers.  Has anyone else encountered this?  If so, how to did you handle it?  Were you able to prove the traffic was correct/incorrect?  If not, does anyone know how I can go about proving that these are recycled IP's that are maybe just not registered correctly yet or if they REALLY were in that city?  

Any help or suggestion are much appreciated!

Thanks!

-Jason

1 Accepted Solution

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Correct answer by
Level 10

Hi Jason,

As Paige, mentioned IP Address is not a reliable way to know about the location. Facebook, Pandora, CPC and other ad publisher use personalization by targeting content to users based on their GPS position or proximity to Beacons. which is quite accurate. This information can be provided by your agency, They can export this from third party systems.

Regards,

Amit

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2 Replies

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Level 2

Hi Jason,

Individuals viewing something at work would in some cases have their traffic go through their employers proxy server and so display an IP Address shared with their head office - wherever this may be. Also some people choose to hide or mask their IP's which would confuse your analysis.

Hope this helps,

Paige

Avatar

Correct answer by
Level 10

Hi Jason,

As Paige, mentioned IP Address is not a reliable way to know about the location. Facebook, Pandora, CPC and other ad publisher use personalization by targeting content to users based on their GPS position or proximity to Beacons. which is quite accurate. This information can be provided by your agency, They can export this from third party systems.

Regards,

Amit