So this was a super interesting one, that after using Google Analytics (well, practically living in it) for 12 years, that was new to me.

The story goes that we had just inherited a new client (common for us) and were doing our initial data due diligence.

We noticed a huge spike in web traffic over a several month period of time, and could not attribute the traffic to any referral source.

So we dug deeper into Geography, and found that the new spike was due to traffic coming from Boardman, Oregon. Looking at the fact that all Boardman, Oregon traffic was spending 00:01 on the site, and had a 90% bounce rate, we knew it was bot/spider related, and not some interest in our clients' business in a new city.

As it turns out, we were right, and this is actually a more common issue in Google Analytics than many realize.

I'm calling it The Boardman, Oregon Issue.

This video shows how to filter out bot and spider traffic from Google Analytics (aka how to fix The Boardman, Oregon Issue).

This is important, because the first step to using data to drive results, is having accurate data. :)