Strange Spike in Direct / None traffic
-
Over the past week or so, my client's Australian personal training website has experienced a dramatic spike in Google Analytics sessions (see attached screenshot). All the visits are coming from various states in the US and via the "Direct / None" source.
All the visits are less than 1 second in duration so I'm assuming it's coming from some sort of automated bots.
I'm worried for a couple of reasons:
A) Could somebody be deliberately spamming the site to adversely affect our rankings?
B) How do I get rid of this traffic from our analytics reports?
-
Dave, did you figure out what was causing the spike?
-
Agreed on looking in at the city/network. I've seen this before, and the cause was a website monitoring service we signed up for that was actually triggering javascript.
-
I've seen something similar to this many times. It's not terribly likely that it will adversely affect your rankings. Though someone may be trying to test your site security.
You could possibly better zero in on the source by using a combination of city/network domain as a secondary dimension to the direct medium.
If you have multiple profiles, you could setup a filter based on what the secondary dimension insights yield - should the traffic continue.
However, a less permanent solution would be a custom report with an exclude for direct traffic from a certain city/region.
Edit: Second thought, if the traffic doesn't stop and starts negatively affecting site performance - you may be able to find the offending IP and block them.
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
-
Filter Remote Workers Traffic
For the most part in the past our company has worked on location. So filtering internal traffic was as simple as filtering out our company IPs as well as a few remote workers IPS. Now a large number of employees are working from home due to Covid-19. I am seeing an uptick in traffic that is clearly employee-related. I am hoping some of you who work with large remote teams may have some suggestions on how to best filter out traffic from remote working employees. I found a few articles from a couple of years ago where people were using a cookie but not sure we can get that implemented in time as our Dev team is backed up. Any help is much appreciated.
Reporting & Analytics | | RMATVMC0 -
A huge spike in traffic, mainely from social and organic
Hi there, We see this huge spike in traffic to our home page for almost a week now. When I check the source I see a crazy spike in Facebook traffic (25,630% change!!), Twitter and organic. The spike in traffic is to our home page alone. The bounce rate is much higher than avg. and time on page is shorter. Also, no. of new visitors to the site is higher than average. The traffic is obviously low quality and is hurting our site's statistics. Any ideas as to why this is happening? Many thanks in advance, Gal
Reporting & Analytics | | tomedess0 -
Analytics not tracking traffic from Old Domain Redirect
We've recently 301 redirected one of our client's domains to their new website and the strange thing is, we aren't seeing an increase in traffic in analytics. You would expect the traffic to increase roughly by the traffic volume from the old domain. There were a few hundred redirects and we tested a large sample and the redirects have been implemented properly. Is there something that we did incorrectly in our implementation of the domain redirect? Or is there something else that we need to do in Analytics to properly track those redirects?
Reporting & Analytics | | ATMOSMarketing560 -
Strange Traffic Spike In Google Analytics
Over the last two days I have seen a huge spike in the pageviews to my site www.learnbonds.com. Up to this point my average page views per visit has been less than 2. For the last couple of days it has jumped to 5 but the average time on the site has not increased. Upon further investigation under the browser and OS page of google analytics I found that traffic coming from internet explorer and IE with Chrome Frame is reporting 10+ pageviews per visit. Below is a screenshot. Any insight into what might be causing this and how to fix it that the community can provide would be appreciated. Thanks
Reporting & Analytics | | davidwaring
DaveZUaQWJd.png?1?21800 -
Domain redirect for direct mail (source) tracking in Analytics?
We have a client that would like to do some direct mail marketing and the plan is to use a short/simple domain in the marketing materials, which redirects to the main site domain. By default this would show as a referral traffic source in Analytics, right? So any traffic that came through that redirect would be attributed to "shortdomain.com / referral"? Meaning I wouldn't need to do any sort of customized, advanced tracking set up to track conversions that I've already set up (ecomm and goals) and attribute them to this new source? Just double checking that I'm not overlooking something. Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | VTDesignWorks0 -
Google Analytics/ Contact 7 Plugin
I have a site that uses the contact 7 plugin for its contact form sitewide in a sidebar and on a contact us page. I've set up a goal in analytics and tracked using the "on_sent_ok" hook but the number of goals GA is creating is far outweighing the number of times the form is actually completed. I figured my initial mistake was to use the contact-us page as the page tracker variable for the goal but wondered if it was counting all form completions AND anyone who went to the contact page. So I amended it to a contact-us/thank-you page that no site visitor could navigate to, and since I have no goals completed, even though we're getting enquiries through the form. Am I being dumb here and missing something quite simple?
Reporting & Analytics | | PerchDigital0 -
Google vs Bing/Yahoo SERP results?
I see large differences in Google and Bing/Yahoo SERP results for many keywords. Google shows many of our primary keywords in their top ten, while Bing/Yahoo rank the same one 40-50 or above. Do you have any insight on their differences that might account for this variation? We are legitimate, long time, white hatters at a small manufacturer that is one of the leaders in our industry. The only thing I can think of that might describe this issue is PPC advertising. Their algorithms wouldn't be that inconsistent would they? (We do much more paid advertising on Google) But generally this should have no affect, right? Thanks, George...
Reporting & Analytics | | rhawk0