Products
Webtrends Analytics 9.x
Webtrends Analytics 8.x
Issue
Why do I see AOL listed in the States and Provinces Report?
Resolution
Since the beginning of 2010, the States and Provinces Report now shows “AOL” in the report though AOL is not a State or a Province. AOL owns a large block of IP addresses that resolve to Virginia. They use this block of addresses for all users regardless of the user’s physical location. Any user of AOL will appear as coming from Virginia even if they were actually in Alaska or Florida for example. As a result of this, traffic numbers in Virginia can be highly inflated causing an inaccurate picture of the traffic.
The latest version of the Geotrends database separates all AOL IP addresses into their appropriate geophysical categories. This results in a more accurate picture of Virginia’s traffic and lets users know that AOL’s addresses were used for that traffic.