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.
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!
-
Hi fishlizzer!
Did Peter's advice help? If so, please mark one or both of his responses as a "Good Answer."
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
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 -
If website users don't accept GDPR cookie consent, does that prevent GA-GTM from tracking pageviews and any traffic from that user that would cause significant traffic decreases?
I've been doing a lot research on GDPR impact and implementation with GTM-GA for clients, but it's been 12 months since GDPR has gone live I haven't found anything on how GA traffic has been impacted if users don't accept cookie consent. However, I'm personally seeing GA accounts taking huge losses in traffic since implementing GDPR cookie solutions (because GTM/GA tags aren't firing until cookies are accepted). Is it common for websites to see significant decreases in traffic due to too many users not accepting cookie consent? Are there alternative solutions to avoid traffic loss like that and still maintain GDPR compliance? It seems to me that the industry underestimated how many people won't accept cookie consent. Most of the documentation and articles around GDPR's start (May 2018) didn't foresee or cover that aspect properly, everything seems to be technically focused with the assumption that if implemented properly most people would accept cookie consent, but I'm personally not seeing that trend and it's destroying GA data (lost traffic, minimal source attribution, inaccurate behavior data, etc). Thanks.
Reporting & Analytics | Apr 23, 2019, 8:19 AM | Kickboard2 -
Paid traffic or "Paid Search" is not showing in my Google Analytics
Hi, I have two campaigns running in Google Adwords or Google Ads now and I saw in Google Ads account that I had 5 clicks today (09/18/2018) but when I try to search for this clicks in my Google Analytics in ACQUISITION > All Traffic > Channels I don't find nothing about "Paid Search" or something like that. Bellow is a picture of my Google Analytics account to prove it. The accounts are linked and I can find the 2 campaigns in the Analytics. How can I interpret this picture? Where the paid traffic is showing? or not showing there? Thanks Leandro uvAtrsg
Reporting & Analytics | Sep 20, 2018, 2:54 AM | lmoraes0 -
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 -
Dark Traffic Mystery!
Hey everyone, My team and I have been digging into this problem and can't find an answer - and it turns out this has been an issue for over year. I'll try to explain the best I can, but let me know if you have any questions. My predecessor noticed a non-existent page URL getting traffic in GA. He had the web dev team create a page so he could see where the traffic is coming from. The page has every directive under the sun on it; noindex, nofollow, noarchive, nosnippet, noodp, noydir, noimageindex, notranslate All of the traffic is (direct) / (none). It gets about 300 visits per day. Avg. time on page is 15:40, bounce rate is 99.6% and it doesn't show up in the funnel. Previous page path is 92% entrance; 8% homepage. Geo is 92% US; then diversified across countries. Browser is predominately Chrome. OS is only Windows, and device is only desktop. I've run this page through a backlink checker, and we get nothing. I've run it through Screaming Frog and it has no internal links pointing to it. I've tried putting quotes around the URL and googling it and we get a few websites, but they're very low authority and it isn't likely that they're sending 300+ visits per day. Also, since all of the traffic is direct, I don't think it's coming from a backlink anyway. This has become a personal quest for several of us, as we really want to figure out where that traffic is coming from. Any thoughts? What am I missing? It's kind of driving me crazy because I can't figure out what I've missed, so if anyone figures this out and is coming to Pubcon in November, I'll buy you a beer!! 🙂
Reporting & Analytics | Oct 3, 2017, 8:47 PM | rachelmeyer0 -
Tracking 301 redirect traffic in Google Analytics
if I 301 redirect www.mywebsite.com to go to www.yourwebsite.com, how can I track the traffic in Google Analytics that is coming from mywebsite.com?? I don't think that's a referral traffic, is it?
Reporting & Analytics | Sep 1, 2017, 4:49 PM | Armen-SEO0 -
Google Analytics - Organic Search Traffic & Queries -What caused the huge difference?
Our website traffic dropped a little bit during the last month, but it's getting better now, almost the same with previous period. But our conversion rate dropped by 50% for the last three weeks. What could cause this huge drop in conversion rate? In Google Analytics, I compared the Organic Search Traffic with previous period, the result is similar. But the Search Engine Optimization ->Queries shows that the clicks for last month is almost zero. What could be the cause of this huge differnce? e9sJNwD.png k4M8Fa5.png
Reporting & Analytics | Mar 18, 2015, 4:18 PM | joony0 -
Referral Traffic vs. Campaign Traffic in Google Analytics
I have two sites: a blog and an ecommerce site. The blog funnels people to the ecommerce site. In Analytics I'm seeing declines in referral traffic from the blog to the ecommerce site. During the same time I'm seeing an increase in campaign traffic to the ecommerce site, with most campaign traffic coming from the blog. I believe the increase in campaign traffic is largely a result of simply having installed more tracking links. This leads me to believe that the declines I'm seeing in referral traffic is simply a result of the increase in campaign traffic. In other words, what was once counted and reported as being referral traffic is now being counted and reported as campaign traffic. So my question is this: In Google Analytics is campaign traffic ALSO reported as referral traffic, or is campaign traffic reported separately and not duplicated in referral traffic reports? I'll provide a concrete example to make this more clear in case it isn't: Say site X sends 1000 visits each month to site Y. Say 50 of those visits come from a single link on X. If that link is changed so that campaign Z data info added (via the Google URL Builder), would you expect to then see 950 referral visits each month from site X to site Y plus 50 campaign visits to site Y via new campaign Z, or would you continue to see 1000 referral visits plus the new 50 campaign visits? Many thanks in advance to anyone that can shed some light on this.
Reporting & Analytics | Nov 26, 2013, 1:09 AM | aaronprimal0