Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
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
-
Finding out why you see a sudden spike in direct traffic sessions on your GA can be a bit tricky due to the lack of source information. However, we can make some safe assumptions by looking at the other metrics. Easiest way to analyze the direct traffic is by grouping the data into two categories:
1. Relevant Traffic
-Direct, relevant traffic are the loyal readers/visitors who are going straight to your website by typing in your URL or have your site bookmarked. This is the ideal scenario all of us would love to achieve. This type of traffic would have a low bounce rate and spend a considerable amount of time on your website (good avg time on page/multiple page sessions).
2. Irrelevant Traffic
-Internal traffic that is not being filtered, especially if you recently did heavy testing on the site. To avoid this install IP filters for you and your team or block internal traffic with GTM and cookies.
-Bot direct traffic, this the most common scenario and also the most complex to solve. Real user and bot traffic can share some characteristics so it is important to narrow down the one that comes only from spiders before filtering or segmenting out this traffic.
Common characteristics of bot traffic:
- A sudden spike in direct visits.
- Default Channel Grouping: Direct
- Landing Page: most of the time is your home page usually represented by a backslash / or /index.html
- Bounce Rate is usually really high close to 100%
- Average Session Time is very low: close to 0 seconds
- Page views average 1 per session
To find the bot trail, go to the Direct traffic report on Analytics select the home page (/) and start adding different secondary dimensions to find common patterns. The more you find the better!
Dimensions recommended to check:
- Browser/Browser version
- Operative system/ OS versions
- Browser size
- ISP or Network domain
- City
- Flash version
Once you find 1 or more patterns from the previous step, you can use them to create an advanced segment to exclude this traffic. This way you are able to analyze true data that isn't skewed from bots to get an actual representation of your visitors behavior.
There are thousands of bots crawling the web for different purposes; there are good and bad bots. In extreme cases you will need to block them from your server, the hosting services are usually very helpful with this type of stuff.
I hope this helps!
-
There may be many reasons for it. Have you checked the bounce rate? If the bounce rate is high it might be bot traffic. As you said direct traffic there are chances you might get a visitor from referrals.
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
-
Rogerbot directives in robots.txt
I feel like I spend a lot of time setting false positives in my reports to ignore. Can I prevent Rogerbot from crawling pages I don't care about with robots.txt directives? For example., I have some page types with meta noindex and it reports these to me. Theoretically, I can block Rogerbot from these with a robots,txt directive and not have to deal with false positives.
Reporting & Analytics | Aug 21, 2024, 5:28 AM | awilliams_kingston0 -
Impressions clicks and traffic drop
Hello,
Reporting & Analytics | Oct 6, 2023, 7:59 AM | SharonEKG
So something weird is going on, i run a few websites for clients, few different CMS. there has been a constant increase in traffic and ranking on one wordpress website and now the squarespace website is climbing up in rankings in the past few months. both has GTM installed for months, which has been optimized regularly.
for the wordpress website, in the past 2 weeks, starting June 4th, on google search console the clicks and impressions has started going down to the point that i lost 90% of clicks and impressions and traffic on analytics has started dropping a few days later, now at about 60% less traffic. for the Squarespace website, exactly the same thing, started June 7th and drop in clicks/impressions (though ranking increase) and then traffic drop. checked both GTM for recent changes incase of wrong code implement, no changes, no new major issues.
different hostings different CMS, no link between them. i just cant put my finger what is going on. anyone got any idea what is going on?0 -
Direct Traffic from Ashburn, VA
We've seen a huge spike in traffic form Ashburn, VA every Monday. It's wrecking our analytics. I don't want to create a filter based on location because we should receive legitimate traffic from that location. I see there are a few other identifiers that make me think I could add a filter for just those items (iOS 5, Safari). Does anyone have a current best-practice for this type of problem? Tx!
Reporting & Analytics | Feb 5, 2016, 4:00 PM | fishlizzer2 -
Help Blocking Crawlers. Huge Spike in "Direct Visits" with 96% Bounce Rate & Low Pages/Visit.
Hello, I'm hoping one of you search geniuses can help me. We have a successful client who started seeing a HUGE spike in direct visits as reported by Google Analytics. This traffic now represents approximately 70% of all website traffic. These "direct visits" have a bounce rate of 96%+ and only 1-2 pages/visit. This is skewing our analytics in a big way and rendering them pretty much useless. I suspect this is some sort of crawler activity but we have no access to the server log files to verify this or identify the culprit. The client's site is on a GoDaddy Managed WordPress hosting account. The way I see it, there are a couple of possibilities.
Reporting & Analytics | Nov 5, 2015, 2:27 PM | EricFish
1.) Our client's competitors are scraping the site on a regular basis to stay on top of site modifications, keyword emphasis, etc. It seems like whenever we make meaningful changes to the site, one of their competitors does a knock-off a few days later. Hmmm. 2.) Our client's competitors have this crawler hitting the site thousands of times a day to raise bounce rates and decrease the average time on site, which could like have an negative impact on SEO. Correct me if I'm wrong but I don't believe Google is going to reward sites with 90% bounce rates, 1-2 pages/visit and an 18 second average time on site. The bottom line is that we need to identify these bogus "direct visits" and find a way to block them. I've seen several WordPress plugins that claim to help with this but I certainly don't want to block valid crawlers, especially Google, from accessing the site. If someone out there could please weigh in on this and help us resolve the issue, I'd really appreciate it. Heck, I'll even name my third-born after you. Thanks for your help. Eric0 -
Adwords start Organic traffic SIGNIFICANTLY drops
I hope someone can give me some insight here, or at least point me in the right direction. As of September 1 we are running Adwords. We are seeing an alarming drop in our organic traffic since then. It's almost like Adwords is cannibalizing organic. August/September Paid 116/847 Organic 648/178 We've looked at why the Organic could have dropped (penalties, site function issues, etc.) and have found nothing unusual. Can someone give me a reason why this might be happening, Why such a dramatic decrease just as adwords is started. Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | Oct 22, 2014, 6:31 PM | Britewave0 -
Does analytics track an order two times by refresh on the confirmation-page?
Hi there,
Reporting & Analytics | Aug 2, 2013, 7:26 PM | Webdannmark
I have a quick question. Does Google analytics track an order two times, if the user buys a product, see the confirmation page and then click refresh/click or back and forward again?
The order/tracking data must be the same, but i guess the tracking code runs for every refresh and therefore tracks the order two times in Analytics or does analytics know that it is the same order? Someone that can clearify this?Thanks! Regards
Kasper0 -
Why is my direct traffic down DRASTICALLY?
I have been seeing a trend for a while that is intesifying. My direct traffic numbers are down A LOT. We are not down 50% to LY (in actual number not just percentage of traffic) I am trying to understand what could be the causes of this issue. I was considering simply bigger meaner competition, but I actually perform decently on my returning customers. Also my performance on my brand keyword is more inline with my current trend so I would except these KW to do equally as bad if the actual brand/store was the issue. The more surprising even, is the fact that I can trace back the start of the trend exactly to the day. Overnight on Sept 22 LY direct traffic went down 30% (to LY) when it was trending UP 20-25%(to LY) before. Now, we did do a redesign of the website on May 2011 (4 months before the drop), and did change host Oct 2011 (a couple weeks after the start of the trend). Do you have any clue as to why this could be happening? Did GA start tracking direct traffic differently?
Reporting & Analytics | Sep 17, 2014, 5:19 AM | CassisGroup
Any thoughts?0 -
Abnormal Spike in Traffic- Ddos or what?
We've noticed a 100% increase in our traffic over the last three days. However, the page views have not increased proportionately. The traffic sources seemed to be dispersed naturally. Could this be a Ddos in the making or some other type of attack as it seems unlikely that we suddenly started receiving thousands of extra visitors. Its a leading news website with a consistent heavy traffic daily which just doubled over the last three days. What should we be looking at?
Reporting & Analytics | Mar 28, 2011, 8:51 AM | RishadShaikh590