Direct Traffic from Ashburn, VA

[fishlizzer]

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!

[MattRoney]

Hi fishlizzer!

Did Peter's advice help? If so, please mark one or both of his responses as a "Good Answer."

[Mobilio]

Well - you can see on monday traffic from US, VA, Ashburn that spike in Monday.

Go in GA, site, Audience, Geo, Location, US, VA, Ashburn. Then add secondary dimension - Browser and later Browser version. And start looking for monday patterns. Once you see spike you need go back in your http web log and find full user agent.

For now there is one good news - if bot can be seen in GA then this mean that bot execute JS for sure. Because there are bots that can't execute JS but make "parasite" traffic. There are also bots that didn't visit your site but make "fake" visit only in GA too.

[fishlizzer]

Any suggestions on how to identify bot user agent? I don't want to block something that should be indexing / crawling the site using the .htaccess file. But, I'd like to be able to filter it from Google Analytics.

[Mobilio]

The usual suspect is "Amazon Datacenter":
https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/global-infrastructure/

Since this datacenter is hosting many bots (Even Roger - MOZ bot was there!) you must identify bot user agent and see why this happens. Most bots follow robots.txt protocol so you can disable them scanning your site.