To effectively plan small cell placement within a current macro cell network, it is necessary to identify the traffic hotspots. Small cells can be placed in hotspot locations in order to effectively offload traffic from the corresponding macro cell. Hotspots can be identified based on information about traffic from/to mobile users, particularly, the observed User Equipment (UE) locations and amount of data transmitted from/to the UEs. Provided are systems and methods for accounting for geo-location errors in identifying hotspots and determining small cell placement.