HUGE spike in Google Analytics Traffic

[LMcLaughlin]

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

[OptiBacUK]

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:

1. Behaviour > Site Content > All pages (primary dimension of page)
2. 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

[LMcLaughlin]

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.

[Carloseo]

What about your referrals from those days, do you see anything suspicious?

[LMcLaughlin]

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!

[Carloseo]

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

[KristinaKledzik]

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

[RyanPurkey]

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.

[LMcLaughlin]

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.

[RyanPurkey]

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.

[LMcLaughlin]

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.

[RyanPurkey]

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!