# Why Your Traffic Spikes from Ashburn or Council Bluffs Aren’t Real Shoppers

Your traffic from Ashburn or Council Bluffs isn’t real customers. Find out what’s causing it and how to fix your analytics without hurting your SEO.

If you’ve checked your analytics lately and noticed a sudden flood of visits from Ashburn, Virginia or Council Bluffs, Iowa, don’t get too excited. Those aren’t real customers. They’re bots. These two cities are home to massive Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud data centers that power much of the internet’s automated traffic. For eCommerce brands, this phantom traffic can distort key metrics, confuse your reporting, and lead to poor marketing decisions if you don’t know what’s behind it. Here’s how to recognize it, confirm it, and clean up your data without accidentally blocking systems your store relies on. Table of Contents What’s Behind the Traffic Why It Happens How to Confirm It’s Bots Impact on Analytics How to Filter or Manage It What Not to Worry About Summary Why Roswell and Why Now What’s Behind the Traffic Ashburn and Council Bluffs have one thing in common: servers, not shoppers. These locations host major cloud networks for Amazon and Google. When you see large traffic volumes from them, you are usually looking at automated systems, not real people browsing your store. These visits often come from: Search crawlers like Googlebot Shopify uptime monitors and app integrations Third-party tools syncing analytics or inventory Malicious or spam bots are scraping content You might also see similar data center activity from The Dalles, Oregon (Google), Columbus, Ohio (AWS), and Mountain View, California (Google HQ). Why It Happens eCommerce platforms and apps constantly communicate behind the scenes. Each check for stock, uptime, or tracking pixels can appear as a visit. These signals often route through AWS or Google Cloud, both headquartered in those same cities. Search engines also contribute by crawling your site to refresh indexes. Meanwhile, malicious bots use cloud servers to scrape pricing data or test vulnerabilities. The result is artificial traffic that looks legitimate until you take a closer look. How to Confirm It’s Bots You can usually spot bot traffic by checking for unusual behavior patterns. Look for: Bounce rates near 100% Session durations under one second No add-to-cart or checkout activity Hundreds of sessions from one city within minutes Inspect your network logs, and you may find user agents such as “Googlebot” or “Shopify Monitor.” Real shoppers have varied, natural session behavior, while bots are fast, repetitive, and uniform. Impact on Analytics While these visits will not damage your site, they can skew your analytics and distort performance data. You might see: Artificially inflated traffic Lowered conversion rates Inaccurate audience geo-data Misallocated ad spend or targeting Understanding and filtering this traffic helps you focus on real customers, not data center noise. How to Filter or Manage It To maintain accurate reporting without blocking critical systems: In Google Analytics 4 (GA4): Go to Admin → Data Settings → Data Filters Enable “Exclude all known bots and spiders” Add custom filters excluding IP ranges from Ashburn, Council Bluffs, and other data center hubs In Shopify: Audit which apps are pinging your storefront Use bot protection tools like Bot Protection or Traffic Guard Review your reports for repetitive patterns At the developer or server level: Apply firewall rules to limit repetitive requests Add CAPTCHAs to sensitive endpoints Log IPs before blocking and avoid blocking entire regions These actions clean your analytics and reduce spam traffic without hurting your SEO or site performance. What Not to Worry About Not every bot is bad. Some are essential to your site’s functionality. For example: Shopify monitors check site uptime Google crawlers keep your store visible in search results Blocking all bots can break indexing, disrupt apps, or create inaccurate dashboards. The goal is not to eliminate every bot, but to filter smartly by separating helpful ones from harmful ones. Summary A surge of traffic from Ashburn, Virginia, or Council Bluffs, Iowa, does not mean your brand just went viral. It means automated systems are interacting with your site by indexing, monitoring, or syncing data. Do not panic and do not block entire regions. Instead, focus on analytics filters, bot management tools, and clear reporting structures to ensure your data reflects real customer activity. Why Roswell and Why Now At Roswell NYC, we help eCommerce brands grow through data clarity and technical precision. Our award-winning SEO and analytics team helps companies: Design bot policies that protect essential systems while filtering out noise Deploy geo-aware schema and filters for cleaner reporting Turn technical fixes into measurable performance gains across search and AI platforms If your dashboards are clouded by traffic from Ashburn, Council Bluffs, or other data center hotspots, we can help you diagnose and resolve it without disrupting your core operations. Schedule a free analytics audit or contact our team today.

## Contact Information
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Phone: 212.227.6140
Email: contact@roswellstudios.com

## About Roswell
We are a full service eCommerce agency providing conversion focused experiences for direct-to-consumer (DTC) and B2B brands. Our portfolio grossed over $350M USD in 2024.