I have had a huge increase in direct traffic to our website but not sure why this suddenly happened? (no promos during this time period)
-
I have had a huge increase in direct traffic to our website but not sure why this suddenly happened? (no promos during this time period), traffic up 200%+ according to Google Analytics
-
Finding out why you see a sudden spike in direct traffic sessions on your GA can be a bit tricky due to the lack of source information. However, we can make some safe assumptions by looking at the other metrics. Easiest way to analyze the direct traffic is by grouping the data into two categories:
1. Relevant Traffic
-Direct, relevant traffic are the loyal readers/visitors who are going straight to your website by typing in your URL or have your site bookmarked. This is the ideal scenario all of us would love to achieve. This type of traffic would have a low bounce rate and spend a considerable amount of time on your website (good avg time on page/multiple page sessions).
2. Irrelevant Traffic
-Internal traffic that is not being filtered, especially if you recently did heavy testing on the site. To avoid this install IP filters for you and your team or block internal traffic with GTM and cookies.
-Bot direct traffic, this the most common scenario and also the most complex to solve. Real user and bot traffic can share some characteristics so it is important to narrow down the one that comes only from spiders before filtering or segmenting out this traffic.
Common characteristics of bot traffic:
- A sudden spike in direct visits.
- Default Channel Grouping: Direct
- Landing Page: most of the time is your home page usually represented by a backslash / or /index.html
- Bounce Rate is usually really high close to 100%
- Average Session Time is very low: close to 0 seconds
- Page views average 1 per session
To find the bot trail, go to the Direct traffic report on Analytics select the home page (/) and start adding different secondary dimensions to find common patterns. The more you find the better!
Dimensions recommended to check:
- Browser/Browser version
- Operative system/ OS versions
- Browser size
- ISP or Network domain
- City
- Flash version
Once you find 1 or more patterns from the previous step, you can use them to create an advanced segment to exclude this traffic. This way you are able to analyze true data that isn't skewed from bots to get an actual representation of your visitors behavior.
There are thousands of bots crawling the web for different purposes; there are good and bad bots. In extreme cases you will need to block them from your server, the hosting services are usually very helpful with this type of stuff.
I hope this helps!
-
There may be many reasons for it. Have you checked the bounce rate? If the bounce rate is high it might be bot traffic. As you said direct traffic there are chances you might get a visitor from referrals.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Shall i index double pages of my website as compared to my competitors?
a:my competitors has indexed 10 pages (checked it with site:abcd.com and found 10 results) b:what if i index 20 pages of my site and create a lot of content which is also better than my competitors who will have the edge?
Reporting & Analytics | | calvinkj0 -
Moving an entire section of a website to a new URL
Hello there,
Reporting & Analytics | | CraigFairgrieve
I currently have a website that offers services to both domestic and business clients. Currently these are hosted on a single URL, then split out .com/business and .com/domestic We're going to be moving the .com/business structure and content to an entirely new URL which will be dedicated to only the business part of the business. This will also mean a change in the branding of the existing content as the new URL will come under the name of the parent company. My question is two fold: (1) What's the best way to go about this? (2) What would be the estimated effect on the traffic? Many thanks for your help in advance.0 -
Free Media Site / High Traffic / Low Engagement / Strategies and Questions
Hi, Imagine a site "mediapalooza dot com" where the only thing you do there is view free media. Yet Google Analytics is showing the average view of a media page is about a minute; where the average length of media is 20 - 90 minutes. And imagine that most of this media is "classic" and that it is generally not available elsewhere. Note also that the site ranks terribly in Google, despite having decent Domain Authority (in the high 30's), Page Authority in the mid 40's and a great site and otherwise quite active international user base with page views in the tens of thousands per month. Is it possible that GA is not tracking engagement (time on site) correctly? Even accounting for the imperfect method of GA that measures "next key pressed" as a way to terminate the page as a way to measure time on page, our stats are truly abysmal, in the tenths of a percentage point of time measured when compared with actual time we think the pages are being used. If so, will getting engagement tracking to more accurately measure time on specif pages and site signal Google that this site is actually more important than current ranking indicates? There's lots of discussion about "dwell time" as this relates to ranking, and I'm postulating that if we can show Google that we have extremely good engagement instead of the super low stats that we are reporting now, then we might get a boost in ranking. Am I crazy? Has anyone got any data that proves or disproves this theory? as I write this out, I detect many issues - let's have a discussion on what else might be happening here. We already know that low engagement = low ranking. Will fixing GA to show true engagement have any noticeable impact on ranking? Can't wait to see what the MOZZERS think of this!
Reporting & Analytics | | seo_plus0 -
Self-Reffering Traffic After upgrading to Universal Analytics
Backstory: We have always had an issue with self-referring traffic but in waiting for the UA upgrade we put it on the backburner for getting fixed. We have now upgraded to UA and I was under the impression that GA would automatically exclude the domain associated with a property as a referral source. However this is not what I am seeing under my referral traffic source. With 10 websites having issues with this I need some help. Should I use the referral exclusion list? Also on a handful of our sites we have region specific URLs, I am also seeing these come in as self-referring traffic. I should also mention that about 85% of our sales are being attributed to the self-referring traffic. Here are two sites for example sake: ZootSports.com and K2snowboarding.com
Reporting & Analytics | | K2_Sports0 -
How do i know that my website affected by Panda Updates ?
If website is affected by Panda updates then how do we know that? If have any type of tools or strategies or alert to find out affected website by Panda then update as soon as possible.
Reporting & Analytics | | renukishor0 -
How do I add subdomain tracking to an existing Google analytics account that was set up to track website only (without the subdomain option)
I know you can track subdomains by just selecting the proper code when you set up the analytics and then create filters for the data in analytics. But how do you add a subdomain for existing analytics website. Is there a way to go back and change to the option to include subdomains and then I assume just replace the tracking code with the new code that Google delivers for this?
Reporting & Analytics | | rhgraves650 -
Site Crash Effect On Traffic
All, I manage a site that unfortunately crashed due to a server issue in late October for about 3 hours. Prior to the crash, traffic was the best it had ever been in the 3+ year history of the site. As you might expect, since the crash traffic has gone gradually down and is now about 15% off pre-crash numbers. I understand that when a site crashes, it disrupts the crawling process and can disrupt traffic (in my case rich snippets were thrown off for days) but would love to hear experiences any of you have had in similar situations. How much did traffic drop after a crash? When did it recover? Other thoughts? Thanks, John
Reporting & Analytics | | JSOC0 -
Direct Traffic Source?
Hi all, Having some trouble figuring out a metric I'm dissecting. We have a large amount of traffic going to deep pages and I'm looking at the traffic source and an alarming amount are coming as Direct traffic. The thing is this can't type in or bookmarked traffic, so what else could it be? We have numbers like 80% and 60% for direct traffic, which judging by our previous efforts, that just can't right. Anyone can figure out what I may be missing out? Deeper pages should usually not get as much Direct traffic, so what can it be?
Reporting & Analytics | | William.Lau0