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
-
Massive unexplained organic traffic drop; disappeared from Google
Hi there,
Search Behavior | | katelynroberts
Our site has experienced a huge organic traffic drop, specifically from Google. The drop occurred on Feb 19 and I've got no clue why it happened. We have not made any significant changes to the website and it doesn't look like there was an algorithm update last week. We don't have any Google penalties or indexing issues noted, and the drop isn't specific to any particular segment/region/keyword. What am I missing? Any advice or insight is super duper appreciated. Our site is a Wordpress/WooCommerice e-commerce site with a blog and long-standing #1 ranks for keywords related to our main product offering. Screen Shot 2024-02-26 at 3.12.25 PM.png
Screen Shot 2024-02-26 at 3.07.52 PM.png0 -
COVID-19 Impacts on Traffic?
How many people here have witnessed some decline in traffic due to pandemic..? It's a thought that since people all around the world are in home and the usage of internet has increased a great deal the traffic on sites should also increase but that is not the case with me on different websites in past 3 weeks... How many people have witnessed the traffic difference ever since the pandemic started or from start of the month of March..? Share your thoughts.
Search Behavior | | asifseo0981 -
Dark Traffic & Long URLs - Clarification
Hi everyone, I've been reading the 2017 report by Groupon and the 2017 article by Neil Patel r.e. dark traffic. Both of these articles work on the assumption that most long URLs are not direct traffic because people wouldn't type a long URL into their browser. However, what happens to me personally all the time is that I start typing a URL into the browser, and the browser brings up a list of pages I've visited recently, and I click on some super long URL that I didn't bookmark but have visited in the past. That is legitimate direct traffic, but it's a long URL. I'm just wondering if there's something flawed in my reasoning or in the reasoning of Patel and Groupon. Maybe most people aren't relying on browsers like I am, or maybe things have changed a lot in the past 3 years. What do you think? And are there any more recent resources/articles that you would recommend r.e. trying to parse out dark traffic? https://neilpatel.com/blog/dark-traffic-stealing-data/ Thanks!
Search Behavior | | LivDetrick0 -
Deceptive site warning from Google: Java script and meta descriptions deployed.
Hi all, We received a deceptive site warning from Google recently. Seems like there is a deceptive content on some pages of the website. Some pages are removed from Google index. Meta descriptions have been deployed on the site few days ago. There is also java script on the website which we use for tracking visitors like GA. I wonder what's the reason for this alert? We believe its due to the Java script. Do you think meta descriptions will harm this bad? Any ideas? Thanks
Search Behavior | | vtmoz0 -
& And + symbols - How does Google read these?
How does/can Google read the plus and ampersand symbols? For instance if I optimise a webpage for 'black & white football' and another page for 'black + white football' would there be any difference in ranking position? Does Google take notice of such symbols or will it only pick up on the keywords 'black white football'?
Search Behavior | | Adam_SEO_Learning0 -
Strange traffic.
We are a norwegian bakeshop (sykkelkompaniet.no) and we have started getting a lot of direct traffic from Miami and Chico. Wondering why, and suspect that someone is trying to hack our system. Any suggestions? We have never been in Chico or in Miami... and we don't spend anything on marketing so far, furthermore we don't ship to the US. The traffic is about 800 unique hits a day.
Search Behavior | | sykkelkompaniet0 -
My website disappears off google!
So this might be kinda of a weird question... Every morning and night I check the ranking of a website that I am building.. The ranking has gone up a lot the last two months. It went from the fifth page to now the second page. I have a issue where some days I check Google my website is completely gone! I go through every page for my keyword and it's not there! After a couple of days of frustration I check again and all of a sudden it is there but now at a higher ranking... I went through the code to make sure there's a not a not follow code in the robots.txt page... Btw another weird thing is so then I look up my website on a google out of country like google.sg and I'm ranking first page like number 5 but again disappeared off google usa. Literally driving my crazy.. does anyone know why this could be? Btw the first time it disappeared I went into webmasters and sent a request because I thought I got penalized but they responded they could not find any spam and I was NOT penalized...
Search Behavior | | BecCan0 -
Huge difference in search results depending on the country?
I have some keywords ranking in pages 2 and 3 in the US but for instance, in Canada, the same keywords rank somewhere between pages 15 and 25. When I check my US rankings, I use a Windows VPS located in the US. When I check my rankings in Canada, I use a computer physically located in Canada. Basically, about 80% of my rankings have gone away for countries other than the US. I have not set any geographical target for my website in GWT. How come there is such a big difference in search results across different countries?
Search Behavior | | sbrault740