HUGE spike in Google Analytics Traffic
-
Hi there,
I am witnessing a giant spike in my Google Analytics data (website: www.exchangecapital.com ) and I am completely stumped. My website usually gains roughly 15-20 visitors a day at most--and as of 11:10 am today my sessions for the day are up to 150.
The traffic spike started on Friday at 132 sessions, Saturday at 261, Sunday at 247, etc. It's common that our sessions don't even hit the double digits over the weekends, so you can imagine my confusion.
After trying to pin down some irregularities in geography, browser, and behavior, I'm still at a loss. I'm seeing a big spike in organic traffic (all not provided), as well as direct page visits, and I'm gaining traffic from US, Brazil, United Kingdom, Mexico, Spain, Malaysia, etc. etc--so not just one specific area.
Is anyone else witnessing this in their data? Does anyone have any insight or ideas as to how I can look further into this? I am at a loss and any information would be appreciated.
Thanks in advance!
Lauren McLaughlin
-
I am in the same boat as you Lauren. What I am struggling to come to terms with is that when looking at the user flow report, there is a lot of movement on the site internally to and from this page indicating that this is not a spam bot.
I tried isolating many factors but arrived at a loss. There was one thing I checked which helped me see that the data may indeed be skewed.
View these two reports and tell me if they are showing the same data:
- Behaviour > Site Content > All pages (primary dimension of page)
- Behaviour > Site Content > All pages (primary dimension of page title)
Those two reports give me very different results. page report shows the massive spike while page title is more realistic.
I am also looking for a possible explanation to this.
Posted up on Google forums too, waiting to see if anyone can help - https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/analytics/stvN44gwYU4;context-place=forum/analytics
-
Referrals are only totaling about 2.5% of my sessions from Friday to today--but I do see seven sessions from best-seo-offer.com and just one from buttons-for-your-website.com. However, as mentioned, my direct and organic search traffic are the ones that have had a huge impact.
-
What about your referrals from those days, do you see anything suspicious?
-
Carlos,
This has been very helpful, and after reading the article provided I had thought the issue had been detected. However, after seeking out the Hostname, I see that all five are accurate and come from www.exchangecapital.com. Ugh!
Unfortunately, I don't think the traffic to the blog is from a popular entry. When we do share links to our posts, we direct the user to our WordPress page at personalinvesting.expert rather than our web page that has the embedded blog--and I can't pinpoint a specific share that would send the user to that landing page. With such a small audience, the huge spike (283 sessions yesterday, vs. 18 sessions from May 12) just doesn't make sense.
To your knowledge, do you think this could this perhaps have something to do with a specific network domain? I've noticed a big increase in traffic coming from a ioflood.com domain--if anyone is familiar.
Thanks so much again to everyone for your feedback, it's all helped in one way or another!
-
Hi Lauren, most likely this is caused by spam, lately spammers have been hitting with fake direct visits along with the referral. You might want to check if you have something similar to free-share-buttons on your referrals.
These referrals are ghost spam and as I mention before they also hit with fake direct visits, to identify them go to
Acquisition > Channels > All traffic > Select Hostname as a second dimension
You will probably see a fake hostname or not set. Also, if you check the landing page they will be "/" and the page title "Home Page" instead of the title of your real home page.
Like I said this type of the spam doesn't have a real hostname, so if you create a filter with only your valid hostnames. You will get rid of all ghost spam(current and new) no matter the way it shows, referral, page, keyword, direct.
You can find detailed information about this issue and the solution in this article
http://www.ohow.co/unusual-increase-in-direct-traffic-on-ga-spam/
Hope it helps,
Acquisition
-
If this is all going to the blog, which is new, this sounds like good news! Chances are, you've written a post that targets a common search term with relatively little competition out there writing about it. You can probably figure out what this topic is by looking at landing pages, or by using Google Webmaster Tools to see the keywords people are using to find your site.
Google Webmaster Tools is a great tool to double check that your traffic fluctuation is real and not a fluke, too, if you're seeing most traffic come from organic. GWT should show the same increase and, like I said, provide keyword data as well.
Let us know how your investigation goes!
Kristina
-
Ah, is your embedded blog on a different domain and being iframed in? The analytics would be more detailed looking at the direct blog data. It sounds like something within the blog went mini-viral and is producing the spike.
-
Ryan,
I actually hadn't yet looked into the landing pages--and I'm now seeing that over 80% of my traffic has a landing page of our embedded blog. This blog is brand new and has acquired very little traffic for us up until now. Do you happen to know what the case might be here, or how I should go about it?
Thanks again for your feedback.
-
Thanks for the clarification Lauren. Have you been able to determine if the organic results are news based? Based on the landing pages are you aware of any rankings that might have jumped up recently? If you can get any insights from Google's Search Console you might get tipped off to some new rankings that are accounting for the spike.
-
Ryan,
Thanks for your input!
My referral visits really haven't changed much at all, however. When I initially discovered the spike, I immediately referenced my referral traffic, assuming that's where the problem was located. The new sessions seem to be strictly from organic search and direct. Can't seem to find a correlation as to where these are all coming from, unfortunately.
-
Hello Laruen! You'll want to look at your direct pages and see if they're getting legitimate traffic in your referrals report: Acquisition >> All Traffic >> Referrals
From there you should be able to get an idea about what recent news or articles that have gone live that have been influencing your traffic. You can also use the Fresh Web Explorer here to see what pages might be mentioning you and sending larger amounts of traffic as well as various tools in Google Search Console (formerly Google Webmaster Tools).
I'm not seeing spikes across clientele so your situation is likely unique to you in that some of your pages have been recently referenced on high traffic sites or has popped into the news cycle. Cheers!
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
-
Search Analytics update in Google Webmasters Tools? Where can we find search queries bringing traffic to website?
I just got up and see Search Analytic's being updated today totally. Their is no option to see old reports. As Search Analytics only share 999 keywords.
Search Behavior | | csfarnsworth
Whats next now?
How can a webmaster finds all search queries bringing traffic to his website?
Any paid or free tool?
Google Analytic's > Acquisition > Search engine optimization > search queries will this area helps? Whole question revolves around. Any good tool that will help you find all the queries bringing traffic to my website?0 -
International Traffic on Analytics - Is this normal?
Hi All, One of our clients has asked why they are getting so much traffic from international countries when they solely operate in the UK. See attached image for % of customers who are visiting our site from different countries. Is this a normal ratio of traffic when we are only targeting UK customers? Thanks o6j2PEc
Search Behavior | | O2C0 -
Privacy Policy requirements for Demos and Interests in Google Analytics
I have a client who is activating the Demographics and Interests in Google Analytics, and I need to provide an appropriate privacy policy, per Google's TOS. Can anybody suggest what to state in the privacy policy? Google says: "If you’ve implemented Google Analytics Demographics and Interest Reporting, you must also disclose in your privacy policy: How you use data from Google's Interest-based advertising or 3rd-party audience data (such as age, gender, and interests) with Google Analytics." So, I guess it's advisable to state that the site gathers "3rd-party audience data." Is it enough to say that the info is being used to better understand and communicate with the website visitor?
Search Behavior | | jrae0 -
How to setup google analytics snapshot
Hello all! I get these awesome emails from google about a specific site. But I am not sure how, and why. But I like the data it generates. I am uploading a screen shot. They are called Analytics' Snapshot. My question is basically: How to setup google analytics snapshot to report on a specific website in my account? Because I have several I track - Over 40 domains, but I am mostly concered with like 4 -5 of them, I would like to report on. Thanks Mozers!! GJF3iQX
Search Behavior | | smstv0 -
Our rel=author profile not show in google result
our "rel= author " profile not show in Google result since last day . Before this our profile is showing in Google serp but suddenly author profile not show for a single page .Google serp rank is ok. for that and other page are working as usual please share views..?
Search Behavior | | SameerBhatia0 -
Google ranks our competitor above us on 1000's of branded queires!!!
Hi all, I have noticed a very bizarre phenomenon in Google SERPs. When I search for a branded keyworks [Product + our brand].
Search Behavior | | ref.price
Amazon.fr appear above us on thousands of results. Google even ranks Amazon above us for queries like [ PriceMinister google plus]. I have tried to ask Google about it but I can’t seem to get an answer. Here is the topic I posted on Google’s forum: http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!category-topic/webmasters/crawling-indexing--ranking/DFvTPr14o_o This seems like a mistake on Google’s side, some kind of semantic association with our two brands! Basically they are sending our customers to our main competitor even though they specifically searched for our brand (PriceMinister). I find the phenomenon quite interesting for the SEO community and frustrating for our company. Does anyone have ideas on this one? Do you think it's a bug from Google? Cheers Oliver0 -
Using Google Analytics to See What Time of Day Visitors View My Site
Hi folks, My company has Google Analytics setup for all of our websites, but I am a bit stumped on something. Now, this may not be possible, but am I able to see what time of day visitors most frequently view my blog? I would like to optimize blog post publishing for when I know we have in influx of visitors, yet I cannot find this information on GA. Any input would be much appreciated. Regards,
Search Behavior | | Instabill
Meghan0 -
Google Penalisation - Any help would be appreciated!
Hi,
Search Behavior | | ChrisHolgate
We’ve recently received a Google notification of unnatural linking along with a confirmation that we're being penalised. There were a few other sites that we owned that perhaps had too many links pointing to our main domain so we trimmed them down and submitted a reconsideration request and got the following back: "Dear site owner or webmaster of http://www.refreshcartridges.co.uk/,
We received a request from a site owner to reconsider http://www.refreshcartridges.co.uk/ for compliance with Google's Webmaster Guidelines.
We've reviewed your site and we still see links to your site that violate our quality guidelines.
Specifically, look for possibly artificial or unnatural links pointing to your site that could be intended to manipulate PageRank. Examples of unnatural linking could include buying links to pass PageRank or participating in link schemes.
We encourage you to make changes to comply with our quality guidelines. Once you've made these changes, please submit your site for reconsideration in Google's search results.
If you find unnatural links to your site that you are unable to control or remove, please provide the details in your reconsideration request.
If you have additional questions about how to resolve this issue, please see our Webmaster Help Forum for support.
Sincerely,
Google Search Quality Team" I want to stress that we have never in the past and do not currently buy any backlinks. The problem that we face now is that our site has been online for best part of a decade, there are thousands of people linking to us and I have absolutely no idea where to start. We don’t use an SEO Company but in the past few months have been using SEOmoz to improve our on-page optimisation. I know it’s a massive ask but if could a member of the SEOmoz community or a staff member quickly take a gander and let us know if anything in particular sticks out like a sore thumb it would mean a great deal to me. Of course, if needed we’ll employ the services of an SEO company but I’m hoping one of you guys will see something immediately obvious that could really help us out! Thanks in advance. Kind regards Chris0