Why do I get lots of traffic from a bizarre keyword?

[pauldoffman]

Bit of an odd one but I've been getting a large and steady stream of traffic over the last few months from a very random keyword that according to addwords figures shows "on data". Its our second biggest referring term only beaten by our brand name. We get more traffic from this term than keywords we have invested a lot of time in that show thousands of traffic volume in addwords. When looking at behavioral data its gets odder, a bounce rate of 98.11% time on site 2 seconds and page visits 1.02.  So this traffic isn't real traffic and it's not real people. So my questions are, what is it? why do we get this random traffic, has anyone els noticed things like this and is it a problem?

I presume it must be something to do with some sort of spam but apart from that i'm stumped.

It's just one of those things that has been bugging me so I would appreciate any help.

Kind Regards

Paul

[adrianvender1]

Paul,

• Have you linked the AdWords account to the GA account?
• Have you enabled Import Cost Data in AdWords?
• Make sure that query string parameters remain in the URL bar when you visit your destination URL.
• Have you tested to see if your GA cookies reset when visiting your 2nd or 3rd pages?

Adrian Vender

[pauldoffman]

yeah I had just used the SEOmoz keyword difficulty tool that pulls in data from the google search based tool and it shows "no data" across the board.

[craven22]

If you show up on the image results thats most likely your problem! Use the google keyword tool to see how much traffic that keyword gets

https://adwords.google.co.uk/o/Targeting/Explorer?__u=1000000000&__c=1000000000&ideaRequestType=KEYWORD_IDEAS

[pauldoffman]

Sorry i should have mentioned in my first post that we do rank second for the term. But the term is so bizarre that I can not believe the traffic is real and also the bounce rate, time on site and so on are extremely abnormal. We do also show up in the image results.

[craven22]

easiest way to find out if this is the cause: find out what term the traffic is coming in from and type it into your search engine. I spent ages wonderig why I was getting all this traffic from obscure terms like 'pound sign' and 'stephen hawkings' until I realised I was ranking first for them in Google UK Image search

[pauldoffman]

Yeah good point. The traffic for the term only comes from google.co.uk. Yahoo and Bing dont refer the keyword at all.

[stevenmusumeche]

Anyway to dig in to see what search engine those referring keywords come from?  Like craven22 said, it might be an image search.

[pauldoffman]

Thanks. Hmmm maybe. How would you find out if someone was hotlinking to an image?

[pauldoffman]

Thanks Steve, We are just using Google analytics .

[craven22]

Are you sure you aren't ranking high up for a popular image search in google? Most likely people searching for something then hotlinking your image

[stevenmusumeche]

Sounds like a bot or scraper to me.  That's strange because usually bots/scrapers don't execute javascript which is needed to show up in Google Analytics.  What analytics package do you use?