Ideas for a strange surge in direct traffic

[pattersonla]

Being the type of person that can't stop checking my Google Analytics, I noticed this morning that between the hours of 12 and 2 central time last night I recieved a strange surge of direct traffic. My site typically gets around 40 direct visits per day (most of them coming during peak hours around the time people are getting off of work). I received 150 direct visits during this random time in the middle of the night. My bounce rate soared as almost every visit was a bounce. The visitors locations are spread out as if it is natural human traffic. Every single one of the visitors is using a chrome browser. Has anyone else run into something like this?  All I can think of is that someone might have an addon or toolbar for chrome that linked to my site for a while in a way that caused unsuspecting visitors to end up on my page. For now I'm keeping my fingers crossed and hoping the traffic doesn't return, as it could be bad news for my Adsense.

*Edit: Also of particular interest, each direct visit went to an internal page on my site and no two of the 150 visits went to the same internal page.

I also added an image showing a normal complete day's direct traffic and my direct traffic for today so far (The bulk of the surge came yesterday but the shot from today illustrates the surge better because it is missing my naturally daily direct traffic that comes in the afternoon)

heXFb#LiiEr

[KeriMorgret]

Beer nights are Wednesday, so he wasn't out drinking last night. I don't think that would have been Roger in any case.

[pattersonla]

Thanks Keri, you got me in the right direction. I think I got to hung up on nice distribution of locations. On looking further each of the direct hits was coming from amazonaws.com (must be a bot of some sort). Has anyone seen Roger? Was he out drinking again last night?

[KeriMorgret]

I had a similar situation once, and determined that it was not 100+ visitors each visiting one internal page by a direct visit, but one visitor going to 100+ pages and something with the browser configuration was not passing the referral information to Google Analytics. I happened to have a secondary analytics program on the site that showed it was all from one computer. Really threw off my stats though.

You might look and see if all of those have the same version of flash/javascript/os/screen resolution. If there's a bunch of "identical" browsers, it might actually be one computer.

[benjaminspak]

• Check if stumble upon sends refferal traffic, or direct traffic.
• @mattcutts and ask him if it will hurt, be transparent and upfront

[pattersonla]

It is really bizarre to me that I couldn't find two direct visits to the same page from the surge. While it is not uncommon to receive some direct traffic to internal pages, the direct visits are typically to just a few of my more popular pages. I haven't myself purchased any traffic as this particular site is purely informational and driven by Adsense clicks. I am waiting for the email that says "Hey did you see your traffic surge last night, pay x amount and we will keep it coming."

[pattersonla]

I don't think it was a social media related post due to the fact that all traffic is showing a Chrome browser. The natural spread of visitor locations has me ruling out a bot and such. It's more of a curiosity thing at this point (as long as it does not return).

Yes it is not that massive since it stopped, but if continued, it would consist of the majority of my site's traffic. I'm under the impression that if you get huge amounts of unnatural traffic that are constantly bouncing off your site, it is a red flag for Adsense  publishers but I may be wrong on this.

Again it's more me being curious than anything. I don't mind being unproductive if I learn something along the way.

[SEOKeith]

Maybe someone posted a link into IRC or shared it on twitter / facebook etc... Could of been a Bot or someone could of scanned your site for vulns... there could be 1000s of reasons why this happend.

Jumping from about 40 to around 150 is not exactly massive... And it's not bad new for your Adsense?? Unless bas news for you is possibly making more money?!

I would stop obsessing over Analytics stats and work on more productive things, like getting more traffic

[William.Lau]

Only thing I can think of is traffic being purchase.

Because you said no 2 of the 150 visits are on the same page, this rules out things like social media and any type of referrals.

Are you saying these are all direct traffic?

Its really REALLY odd that they are direct traffic to an internal page, and most likely is purchased traffic.