Huge increase in US direct visits to a UK site, why?

[MarkHincks]

Hi all,

My UK website usually gets around 10,000 direct (Direct in Analytics) visits per month however for August this has shot up to 24,000! However the majority of these direct visits seem to be coming from the US and as a result the bounce rate is through the roof, 84%!

Why would my UK based site suddenly be receiving huge amounts of US visits? Any ideas?

[Ben_Alvord]

Try applying this Advanced Segment, which will segment out your metrics showing only the traffic which originated from America:

https://www.google.com/analytics/web/template?uid=XGA6--mISZqq4AT60sJBRQ

Once the advanced segment is applied, you can look around on various reports and try to see if you can find anything which seems out of whack.

[KeriMorgret]

Here are a couple of causes of that, which I've seen in my own analytics.

1. A website monitoring service was added, that was somehow triggering javascript. I found this by looking in the hosts section of GA, where you usually see what ISP people are using.

2. GA is for some reason counting one visitor going to a bunch of pages as lots of visitors going to one page. The visitors were all from the same city, all had the same resolution of their monitor, version of flash, etc. I verified this because we happened to be running a second stats program on the site, and I saw they were all from the same IP and just browsing the site.

[MarkHincks]

Thanks for your responses guys.

What troubles me is that the pages per visit is just 1, the avg time on site from these visits just 3 seconds and then a huge bounce rate, making me believe that it could be an attack.

However there is no common landing page - i thought this maybe the homepage if i was under attack.

In a normal month we will receive 10,000 direct visits across 3,000 pages - this month it's 24,000 visits across 9,500 pages!

Even if these were genuine US citizens surely the odd hundred or so would click on additional pages before realising it was the wrong site?

I don't understand it.

[zeepartner]

Same here, the US often generates the largest traffic on english sites because there are many more users in the US... But the fact that those are all direct users is strange and might be a bug. Sometimes traffic is shown as direct, even though it's referred from other pages or even search engines.

[mblsolutions]

Hi Mark,

A similar thing happened to a client of mine. When we looked into it a company of a similar name was doing an advertisement drive in America.

When people were typing in the name of the company into Google and only remembering part of it if our clients name came up as well as the other company and people were mistakenly clicking on our clients website.

It is worth checking to see if there are any similar named companies that operate out of America and check their website to see if they are running any promotions.

As Chris says it is also worth checking back over any changes you have recently made to your link profile as well.

Hope that helps.

[GPainter]

Hi Mark,

Without looking in depth my first thought would be your link profile, take a look at your links and see if you have had a new link that is US based pointed towards you. Once/if you find it you can work on removing it if you are worried about the bounce rate.

Hope this helps.