Has anyone else seen a large increase in Direct Traffic in Analytics since August 21 2017?
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I work at an agency that has Google Analytics to many different sites. About half of them have seen a huge increase in their "Direct" traffic since August 21. Given the cross section of sites I am viewing, I don't think this issue just effects our clients.
So has anyone else seen this issue? Any ideas on how to correct/filter?
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With some help from Greg Gifford we learned that this was from a widget that Edmunds had put on a lot of client's sites. The problem has since been resolved.
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I have been seeing a slow gradual increase in direct traffic for the last year and am stumped.
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Hi there,
No, I haven't seen any increase personally.
I dont think you can gain extra direct traffic overnight as a result of Google algorithm or anything. I would recommend to analyse your direct traffic and determine whether it's not spam. We used to have bad bots, nasty referrals etc and it really used to mess our data. You will recognise these by 100% bounce rate, 00:00:00 time on site. It's quite likely to be just a couple of locations. I have China and Russia and a few areas in the US completely filtered as I don't need to track then (not relevant traffic) and I prefer seeing less of relevant traffic than more of rubbish.
Let me know your findings ease! Good luck!
Katarina
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