Analytics oddity
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This one has me a bit puzzled... I was just conducting a bit of routine analysis on a client's site, when I noticed avg. traffic doubled on one particular day. Now, this was easy to spot, since avg daily traffic for this site is 100 per day. The site also has approximately 100 pages of content. Here is the odd part... the spike was clearly attributed to Direct traffic and from a specific network in Palo Alto. The Bounce Rate was 100% and it appears that every page on the site was visited - very briefly.
Any clues as to what may have triggered this? A competitor maybe? An unkown bot?
I am looking forward to your thoughts.
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I really would like to know the answer, because it happens in some of my sites too.
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I agree. Don't think it's a bot. Can't believe I was so focused upon GA, I forgot about the raw server data! Unfortunately, the host just updated and IP info. I wanted to look at is no longer present.
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I did just that, and you are right on the money. Upon drilling down, everything was the same. Strange thing is... I can't see one person accessing 100+ pages.
For the isolated "abnormal" visits in question - Bounce Rate was 100% - Avg. Visit - Duration was 00:00:00 - classified as Direct Traffic
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I don't think so... why? From a non-technical perspective: I have not seen this sort of activity appear on other client accounts. For example, one domain I monitor has well over 1,000 pages indexed. If a bot crawled and GA included the crawl, the traffic spike would have been easily spotted.
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I doubt it is an automated bot, as it would not fire GA traffic. Best way to determine what happened is to look at your server log for that specific day and analyse the raw traffic data.
Depending on the nature of the website, it could very well be a hack-attack or competitors looking at your site. You will be able to get some information from GA (i.e. OS and browser versions), but to really determine what happened, the server logs are your best bet.
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I would be that if you drill down to the browser version, flash version, etc. that it'd also be identical. I've seen this once or twice, and for me, it turned out that it was one computer and either GA was messed up, or the browser was set oddly -- it was really one person visiting many pages on the site, but for whatever reason it showed in GA as multiple visits each going to one page. I can't say for sure that's what is happening for you, but that's what it was in my case (I happened to have a second analytics package and was able to see that it was truly the same user).
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It sounds like a bot to me. Whose bot? Hmm...could be any bot that accessed your sitemap.
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