11 replies to this topic

[incrediblehelp]

Anyone noticing Direct visits going up at a usual rate? We manage a site called www.mac-forums.com and started recently seeing Directs climb aggressively, while at the same time our search numbers are dropping. Image attached


Could this be a GA data bug or something we are doing technically wrong on our side? Anyone else seeing weirdness like this? I isolated huge increase to two pages on the site: /forums/ and /blog/. I attached those screens hots as well. I cant wrap my head around why so many Directs are now showing up

I didn't believe this data to be true, but I pulled the raw logs and it was. Thoughts?

Forums screenshot

OK screenshot attachments are not working. I have uploaded them:

[mikeunderell]

It's tough to say from the screens you've posted. It could be anything, both good or bad, causing your direct traffic to climb.

I actually just went through this a little while ago and it turned out to be some kind of data scraper. I found this out quite quickly because when I went into my Direct Traffic report I was able to see the pages the "direct traffic" was landing on. There were a few pages being landed on, which showed me that it wasn't regular traffic patterns. Not only that, but my direct traffic on-site stats were totally out of whack, namely time on site was below 5 seconds and my bounce rate was over 95%. Clearly something fishy was going on. The problem has been rectified, but that is how I got to the bottom of it.

I hope your solution is as quick to find as mine was. If not, then post some more information here so that we can possibly help out! (Only if you're comfortable posting more information that is...)

Best of luck!

[Jill Whalen]

Yep that's a good idea to cross reference it by landing page. Also look at it by country. May end up finding it is some sort of bot.

[incrediblehelp]

So GA allows bot traffic in? When did that start?

[Jill Whalen]

Mostly it doesn't, but it seems that some gets through these days.

[klaconcepts]

We have had a few incidents of spam sites hitting us multiple times. We will all of a sudden have a huge spike in traffic. You can see where is it coming from in the sources report. What those sites are looking for is for when you see a spike in traffic and that it is coming from them, you will then go to their site to see who they are. This gives them a HUGE spike in traffic increasing their rankings. They do this to many many sites. A few that I know are guilty of such things are: trafficfaker.com and forex-ninjas.com, but there are many others. You will need to add a filter blocking google analytics from counting their visits. That is under profiles>filters

[incrediblehelp]

KLA that is the problem. Their is no referrer it is dumped in to the Direct bucket.

[klaconcepts]

Sorry missed that. So is your referrals area blank? Or is it just that the refferals area is normal, but the direct traffic figures are off?

[incrediblehelp]

No it is not blank. We get plenty of referrals and they are normal and not fake. The Direct traffic is growing at a enormous pace and we don't know why.

[mikeunderell]

Hm, this is rather puzzling. Have you found the reason yet? Could referrer information be getting dropped/stripped somehow when the person clicks to come to your site?

[MarkeD_NetBooster]

This isn't bots (that have to execute javascript to be showing up anyhow) and more likely a tracking problem for your SEO/PPC. We quite commonly see direct traffic rise when campaign info isn't available.

Other than that, I've seen this occur when two conflicting tracking scripts were being called on the page.

I just checked www.mac-forums.com/ and yeah you have conflicting GA scripts - one from a very dodgy looking source.... adulterotic.biz

Its UA account sending data is UA-34481044-1
The UA code on your page is UA-256751-8

I suspect you are importing the GA script from an iframe or similar, or you've been hacked. Check all your external javascript calls and iframes. The dodgy GA only seemed to trigger on the homepage for me, so I guess an advert you have running there perhaps.

Get in touch if you'd like the office to look at it, or find a local GACP.

The request to GA when you visit your page is shown below (captured with chrome plugin GA debugger)

Account ID : UA-34481044-1
Page Title : Shoe Care Products | Replacement Shoe Laces - Shoe-String Laces Ltd, UK
Host Name : shoetring.info
Page : / Referring URL : adulterotic.biz/buy.php
Hit ID : 1669827222
Visitor ID : 1009061990
Session Count : 1
Session Time - First : Fri Aug 31 2012 18:14:13 GMT 0200 (CEST)
Session Time - Last : Fri Aug 31 2012 18:14:13 GMT 0200 (CEST)
Session Time - Current : Fri Aug 31 2012 18:14:13 GMT 0200 (CEST)
Campaign Time : Fri Aug 31 2012 18:14:13 GMT 0200 (CEST)
Campaign Session : 1
Campaign Count : 1
Campaign Source : adulterotic
Language : en-us
Encoding : ISO-8859-1
Flash Version : 11.4 r402
Java Enabled : true
Screen Resolution : 1440x900
Color Depth : 24-bit
Ga.js Version : 5.3.5d
Cachebuster : 1191179120

[netmeg]

Actually this very well could be bot traffic; there are plenty of bots that execute javascript now, and in fact one of my sites was hit by something similar for several months earlier in the year. AND it was picked up in Google Analytics (as well as StatCounter, Woopra, and every other stats or analytics program) I wrote about it here at the link below. Mine eventually stopped, as mysteriously as it started, but it's still going on for some.

http://netmeg.com/bot-attack/