Demographic data is based on website visitors, not users who have seen the ads. The website visitors could be users directed from ad clicks as well as organic traffic.

IP Address does not match User’s location

The demographic region is based on the location of your IP address, which may be set to China, particularly for users we target in Hong Kong who may be on a work computer and company is based in mainland China. Or to your point, people have set their IP to another country to watch subscription tv, etc.

The regions are large and not suburb specific, so ads showed to people in Geelong, could show people in Melbourne.

User interest in a property in your area

If a user in Pakistan is shown to be interested in a property in Sydney based on their search and browsing behavior, they can see your ads. There are investors and expats looking to return home who also may be searching for property in the area that you're advertising. This can result in them seeing ads on Facebook, GDN, and Search. However, we have multiple reports showing the number of site visitors from abroad is minimal.

Investors and returning expats

People may express an interest in a property in your region and be exposed to your ads, in particular, with Search ads. In the example with high traffic from Hong Kong, there are a lot of expats in Hong Kong looking to return home and locals looking to migrate to Hong Kong given the country’s unrest. India also has close ties with Australia so likely to have an interest in Australian property, or an Australian resident sharing a property with family in India.

Sharing the site

Users in the targeted regions could have visited the site and shared it with a family member in another country.

Repeated visitors from the same countries

If they have visited your site, they will be retargeted and the same users likely to see your ads again which explains why some agents noticed the same countries appearing on their digital reports

However, bot traffic happens

Once a site is live, it is public and anyone can find it which can include bots. We exclude known bots from our Google Analytics account, therefore, that traffic is not seen on reports. Despite our precautions, illegitimate traffic can sometimes slip through the net. This is quickly identified by an unusually large spike in a particular untargeted location (200+ clicks). We then check Google Analytics to see if the traffic came from the same device and look at the time on site, bounces, etc. We manually remove the bot traffic from the reports after we spot it and block the bot.

Bots happen to every website and it is unavoidable, however, we have the tools and team in place to identify them quickly and correct them

Recommendation

One thing that would help reduce international traffic that is not relevant is to include the country in the suburb field on the UPW. For international campaigns, we’d recommend to include the suburb in the Suburb field (ex “Bellevue Hill, Sydney”)