Why Do I Get so Much Click Traffic from Ashburn, Virginia?

In a recent company survey, just for fun, we asked what city our users were getting the most traffic from. Multiple responses replied: Ashburn, Virginia. 

However, the users had no connection to the small town outside of Washington D.C., USA in northern Virginia.

So what party is happening in here? Why are so many people from there clicking on your links? Something must be going on because a significant percentage of your traffic is coming from there. Has your site been hacked? It could be a Godzilla mega bot that’s clicking away. However, neither Godzilla nor bots can click. (No thumbs. Either of them.)

The reason some of your click traffic appears to be coming from this city is that it’s home to one of the biggest technology centers in the world. In fact, internet companies like Amazon.com, Time Warner, and AOL route their information through the Dulles Technology center. The region is reportedly home to more telecom and satellite companies than any other place on earth.

Statistics show that in 2013, as much as 70% of the world’s Internet traffic traveled through data centers in this county.

This infographic contains some real insight. Highlights include:

• 2.2 trillion Google searches pass through this city every day
• The city is the communications gateway to Europe
• Worldwide: 1.8 Zettabytes of data was created in 2011—equal to every U.S. citizen tweeting 3x per minute for 26,976 years

Why would you care where your clicks come from?

Geographical location is one of the most interesting statistics to track from your short link dashboard. Here’s why:

• To see what content is interesting to people, and where
• To better hone in on your engaged audience
• To optimize your campaign for language or time based on where you’re getting the most engagement. BL.INK users: You may uncover some good opportunities for dynamic link routing based on language or time zone.
• To refocus your campaign if your engaged audience is different than your intended audience
• And in all honesty, it’s really interesting to see someone halfway across the world click on something YOU posted

Feeling curious about your own traffic? Check out your BL.INK analytics dashboard to see from where in the world your links are clicked!