Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Seeing massive spikes in direct traffic with 100% bounce rates
-
Hi all,
Looking through Analytics yesterday, I saw that my website had a huge increase in direct traffic in sessions. However, they apparently spent 0 seconds on the website in total so that raised plenty of red flags.
Does anyone have reasons why this might be? Spam or bug?
Thanks in advance!
-
Hey
Could be web crawlers and othet bots. You can jump in and take a look for yourself:
In GA, click on the Audience Tab, then Technology, then Network.
This will then list all of the ISPs that have visited your site. I'm pretty confident that you will find the culprit in there.
Now, if you're thinking - this is skewing my reporting, I don't want it in there - you can block that referrer in your GA report. Here's how you do it:
First - always make sure you keep an unfiltered version, just in case something goes wrong.
In your filtered view, go to the Admin Tab, select the view you want to edit, and then click on filters.
Click "add a new filter", then add a new filter like this:
http://i.imgur.com/6WBhyJA.jpg
Here, I am blocking Google's crawler. To block any other, all you'd need to do is to take the service provider name that you find in the technology -> network report and add it into that filter field (the brackets and ^ icon make it an exact match filter). You can verify the filter before you apply it, and from therein that ISP will be removed from your report. It won't retrospectively apply the filter, however.
Hope this helps.
Tom
-
You can go to
Acquisition>referralsto find out where they might be coming from.I can imagine a lot of the visits are from GA code ghosting which is from sites like free-share-buttons.com etc. these can be filtered out of your reports etc. if it bugs you. Its a bit of a problem of late and bugs the heck out of me. Let me know if it is a lot of spammy looking referrals
-
Hi Whittie,
The unusual spike on direct visits is most likely because of ghost spam, check your referrals and see if you see free-social-buttons or something similar (there might be others), this spammer has been hitting with fake direct visits along with the referral. To be sure this is spam go to:
Acquisition > Channels > All traffic > Select Hostname as a second dimension
You will probably see a fake hostname or not set. Also, if you check the landing page they will be "/" and the page title "Home Page" instead of the title of your real home page.
The problem with conventional methods of stopping spam is that they will just take care of the referral part. The best solution for ghost spam is to use a filter that includes only your hostnames. This will stop ghost spam in any form referral, organic, page and even the fake direct visits.
You can read this article for details about this specific issue and the valid hostname filter.
http://www.ohow.co/unusual-increase-in-direct-traffic-on-ga-spam/
Hope it helps,
Whittie
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
-
Best way to manage multiple (+100) analytics accounts as a marketing agency?
As marketing agency we have for each client an analytics account. This means that we have more than 100 analytics accounts. Because there is a limit of 100 analytics accounts (free version), we have created multiple accounts that own different analytics accounts of our clients. Is it possible to use x@conversal.be and add it to each of our multiple analytics accounts as manager or is there a limit too? In other words, how many accounts can you manage as 'manager'?
Reporting & Analytics | | conversal1 -
We have a client that wants to apply UTM URL tagging to track local organic traffic in Google Analytics. Is there any benefit in doing this?
One of our clients requested that we apply UTM URL tagging to better track organic traffic in Google Analytics. We found this to be an odd request because we are most familiar with UTM tracking for special campaigns (referral tracking, PPC, email tracking, etc). Is there any benefit of applying UTM tags to urls to analyze local organic traffic in Google Analytics? Are there any resources out there about this? Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | RosemaryB0 -
Help Blocking Crawlers. Huge Spike in "Direct Visits" with 96% Bounce Rate & Low Pages/Visit.
Hello, I'm hoping one of you search geniuses can help me. We have a successful client who started seeing a HUGE spike in direct visits as reported by Google Analytics. This traffic now represents approximately 70% of all website traffic. These "direct visits" have a bounce rate of 96%+ and only 1-2 pages/visit. This is skewing our analytics in a big way and rendering them pretty much useless. I suspect this is some sort of crawler activity but we have no access to the server log files to verify this or identify the culprit. The client's site is on a GoDaddy Managed WordPress hosting account. The way I see it, there are a couple of possibilities.
Reporting & Analytics | | EricFish
1.) Our client's competitors are scraping the site on a regular basis to stay on top of site modifications, keyword emphasis, etc. It seems like whenever we make meaningful changes to the site, one of their competitors does a knock-off a few days later. Hmmm. 2.) Our client's competitors have this crawler hitting the site thousands of times a day to raise bounce rates and decrease the average time on site, which could like have an negative impact on SEO. Correct me if I'm wrong but I don't believe Google is going to reward sites with 90% bounce rates, 1-2 pages/visit and an 18 second average time on site. The bottom line is that we need to identify these bogus "direct visits" and find a way to block them. I've seen several WordPress plugins that claim to help with this but I certainly don't want to block valid crawlers, especially Google, from accessing the site. If someone out there could please weigh in on this and help us resolve the issue, I'd really appreciate it. Heck, I'll even name my third-born after you. Thanks for your help. Eric0 -
Google Analytics - Organic Search Traffic & Queries -What caused the huge difference?
Our website traffic dropped a little bit during the last month, but it's getting better now, almost the same with previous period. But our conversion rate dropped by 50% for the last three weeks. What could cause this huge drop in conversion rate? In Google Analytics, I compared the Organic Search Traffic with previous period, the result is similar. But the Search Engine Optimization ->Queries shows that the clicks for last month is almost zero. What could be the cause of this huge differnce? e9sJNwD.png k4M8Fa5.png
Reporting & Analytics | | joony0 -
Adwords start Organic traffic SIGNIFICANTLY drops
I hope someone can give me some insight here, or at least point me in the right direction. As of September 1 we are running Adwords. We are seeing an alarming drop in our organic traffic since then. It's almost like Adwords is cannibalizing organic. August/September Paid 116/847 Organic 648/178 We've looked at why the Organic could have dropped (penalties, site function issues, etc.) and have found nothing unusual. Can someone give me a reason why this might be happening, Why such a dramatic decrease just as adwords is started. Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | Britewave0 -
Referral Traffic vs. Campaign Traffic in Google Analytics
I have two sites: a blog and an ecommerce site. The blog funnels people to the ecommerce site. In Analytics I'm seeing declines in referral traffic from the blog to the ecommerce site. During the same time I'm seeing an increase in campaign traffic to the ecommerce site, with most campaign traffic coming from the blog. I believe the increase in campaign traffic is largely a result of simply having installed more tracking links. This leads me to believe that the declines I'm seeing in referral traffic is simply a result of the increase in campaign traffic. In other words, what was once counted and reported as being referral traffic is now being counted and reported as campaign traffic. So my question is this: In Google Analytics is campaign traffic ALSO reported as referral traffic, or is campaign traffic reported separately and not duplicated in referral traffic reports? I'll provide a concrete example to make this more clear in case it isn't: Say site X sends 1000 visits each month to site Y. Say 50 of those visits come from a single link on X. If that link is changed so that campaign Z data info added (via the Google URL Builder), would you expect to then see 950 referral visits each month from site X to site Y plus 50 campaign visits to site Y via new campaign Z, or would you continue to see 1000 referral visits plus the new 50 campaign visits? Many thanks in advance to anyone that can shed some light on this.
Reporting & Analytics | | aaronprimal0 -
How can we view traffic from specific Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Reddit accounts in Google Analytics?
Dear Moz Community, This is a Google Analytics question. Using Google Analytics, we're trying to identify trends of visitors on a website from specific social media accounts, i.e: twitter.com/account-x facebook.com/account-x youtube.com/account-x reddit.com/r/account-x Ideally, we would like to be able to see the success rate for specific posts on these social media accounts, and how users engaged on the website after arriving from clicking a link on one of these accounts. Is this drill-down feature currently possible in Google Analytics? Many thanks for helping!
Reporting & Analytics | | BoomDialogue690 -
How can i see queries what my visitors are searching for, in my website?
Google analytics installed, but they are not showing. What additional things should i add there? I need to see most popular search queries and add more content to these pages for panda.
Reporting & Analytics | | bele0