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Weird. Sure looks like one of those fake traffic buys…
Hmmm interesting..
I can’t access the image from the office (no facebook here) but don’t suppose you have the IP addresses? You could try searching project honey pot for them and see if they are registered there..casinojack;212833 wrote:What are the countries of the new traffic ?I believe he mentioned they were all from the US, one from each city or something like that. Check the first post
one possibility is that your buddy used the same analytics code accidentally on one of their other sites? GA will show them both as one in an analytics account and there’s no apparent easy way to remove the duff stats either.
One thought I have is that the traffic may be from StumbleUpon?
StumbleUpon is a site that allows people to give a thumbs up to pages that they like, and categorise them. These pages are then displayed to other StumbleUpon users that said they were interested in these categories.
I “think” it might be because :
1) StumbleUpon jumps to the pages using a “toolbar” that people click on – so I do not beleive that this will pick up any referrer page – and software often assumes that must mean a direct referrer.
2) StumbleUpon traffic is rubbish. Click, click, click. It’s a bit like changing channels on a TV people with very quickly jump away from a page to the next page in the category if nothing attracts them in 2 seconds.
Both points would seem to describe your traffic.
:hattip:BTW : 12 months ago I was a happy StumbleUpon user – and the concept of a human moderated database of interesting sites was working well. I great way to kill an hour or two and find intersting sites that were not well search engine optimised.
Now – after StumbleUpon got popular – affiliates, marketters, and summy scammers have bloated the database into an unwieldly spamfest – and I never use the toolbar now. It’s basically been killed as a useful idea.
Shame …
:Cry:@Gregger 212824 wrote:
Taking a look further. Direct traffic had an 85% bounce rate. I figured it was just a bot running a refresh on the site. Then I saw that there was a 95% new visitor rate and looking at the map overlay for only direct traffic I saw that the visits were coming 1 each form cities all over America.
Now there is no reason there should have been an increase in direct traffic. Is this a bot? Is this a traffic seller showing off so they can try and contact him and sell traffic later? Is this Google crawling from its data centers?
Gregger,
I would venture to say that you are correct here. It sounds and smells like a bot, that is alternating between a wide range of IP’s that are owned. It could be a traffic seller demonstrating his fast, new technology, or alternatively, it could be used for scraper purposes. You should have your friend check for logs back a bit, and see if the bot visited the site before (hence, the explanation for direct access).
Thanks for all the feedback guys. I think we might run a search of the IPs in project honey pot like Renee suggested. It seems to have dropped off by a lot yesterday so maybe this was a temporary thing.
@Gooner, there is a stumbleupon source of traffic, do you think that is only from people clicking out directly from someone’s profile?
@PokerSEO, I don’t know if that is the case, but I have actually seen that before. A small site that was getting a few hundred accidentally had its code put on a huge landing page. It was only like that for a day, but the whole months data is useless because of the volume.Have you considered that it is from an image from the website that has landed on google images? My site increased traffic 10x the normal visits last month because google had taken a picture of a pitbull I posted on my blog for pitbull poker and it was at the top of the normal search for the keyword “pitbull”. Needless to say it was junk traffic but I learned that alt tags in images really DO matter!
@Gregger 212879 wrote:
@Gooner, there is a stumbleupon source of traffic, do you think that is only from people clicking out directly from someone’s profile?
Yes if you jump from a link at StumbleUpon’s website – then StumbleUpon are listed as the referrer – and usually I find thyat this traffic quality is better – and people specfically chose to look at that site.
As I said toolbar clicks appear to be “direct” in some stats – or some “other” traffic if you have a stats engine that allows for this toolbar traffic.
:hattip:TheGooner;212887 wrote:Yes if you jump from a link at StumbleUpon’s website – then StumbleUpon are listed as the referrer – and usually I find thyat this traffic quality is better – and people specfically chose to look at that site.As I said toolbar clicks appear to be “direct” in some stats – or some “other” traffic if you have a stats engine that allows for this toolbar traffic.
:hattip:Just as a second to this, Greg do the logs show a user agent? If they do then the above is not possible and I would say it is definitely a bot. One way to rule a few things out.
Let us know how you go.
I found it!
I can’t believe I missed this, but I checked to see what the top content was and it was a review on his site of a product he had done recently. The company that makes the product mentioned the review in their e-mail newsleter.
There was an decent amount of traffic from mail.yahoo clients etc and I think the direct traffic came from people using outlook. Google Analytics wouldn’t know how to site the source of outlook so it put it as direct.
The product wasn’t exactly spot on in his niche, and the page wasn’t exactly conversion optimized which would explain the 95% bounce rate.
I figure that most of the people spent some time reading, but of course Google can only track time on site if you visit another page afterward.
Bingo! Thanks guys, you have helped me maintain my reputation as Google Guru amongst my friends.
