Has anyone else seen a large increase in Direct Traffic in Analytics since August 21 2017?
-
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?
-
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.
-
I have been seeing a slow gradual increase in direct traffic for the last year and am stumped.
-
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
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
-
I have had a huge increase in direct traffic to our website but not sure why this suddenly happened? (no promos during this time period)
I have had a huge increase in direct traffic to our website but not sure why this suddenly happened? (no promos during this time period), traffic up 200%+ according to Google Analytics
Reporting & Analytics | | Julia_a1a1 -
Analytics Tracking in China
I am setting up a Chinese domain and I was wondering if anyone has experience with using Google Analytics for tracking in the country and if it really works or if Baidu is the better solution for the website. The website will be hosted in the US so I don't know if that makes any difference with getting around "The Great Firewall". I would prefer to us GA if possible because I am extremely familiar with the platform but I am more concerned with getting accurate tracking data for the site. Thank you in advance and any help would be greatly appreciated. Brooke
Reporting & Analytics | | Ryan_Henry0 -
What is the difference between "Organic Traffic" and the "Non-Paid Search Traffic" default segment in Google Analytics?
These two filtering options ("organic traffic" in the left sidebar and "non-paid search traffic" in the advanced segments) give me slightly different numbers. Any idea why this would be the case?
Reporting & Analytics | | FPD_NYC1 -
Impressions in Google Analytics
I am trying to compare SERP impressions in Google Analtyics between two different time periods. I want to compare the last two months, with the previous two months. Now this works fine when I go to Traffic Sources > SEO > Queries. Our analytics has been set up since early last year, so I cannot understand why, for a couple of weeks at the start of the previous two months, it is showing that I have less than 10 impressions per day, then in one day, it jumps to 22,000 impressions, and starts to show 'real' information after that... Very frustrating when I am trying to show how effective my work has been. Can anyone shed any light on this?
Reporting & Analytics | | MirandaP0 -
How do I best segment tablets on Google Analytics
I would like to find a way to best segment out my tablet traffic to measure performance; however I'm finding that there are road blocks. It doesn't seem that device operating systems or screen resolutions have clear cut differences in the tablet/mobile versions. Has anyone here found a good way to create a "tablet" segment in Google Analytics? Right now I'm having to lean on solely the ipad traffic to get indicators of tablet performance. Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | lvstrickland0 -
Google Analytics Options
A couple of months ago, I read about a new web stats application that is real time but more importantly let's you track user actions on a page (i.e. which buttons were clicked for example). This information would obviously be very helpful in continuing to improve site performance. Anyone have suggestions or know the name of this application? I do not mind paying but am not looking for an enterprise class application.
Reporting & Analytics | | Mont0 -
Analytics URL Tagging
For some reason I can't get Google Analytics to pick up my URL tags, am I doing something wrong? http://www.example.com/?utm_source=carscom&utm_campaign=3rdparty&utm_medium=referral
Reporting & Analytics | | kylesuss0 -
Why do I get lots of traffic from a bizarre keyword?
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
Reporting & Analytics | | pauldoffman0