Bounce Rate Manipulated with Direct Traffic Spikes - Thoughts?

[ByteLaunch]

Hi Mozzers, we're hoping to get some insight from some of the technical folks out there on what seems to be malicious targeting of a client's website.

We recently discovered enormous spikes in direct traffic to the website with 90% originating from the USA and the rest coming from dozens of other countries. Nearly 100% of visits are new sessions and each only lasts a few seconds - thereby driving the bounce rate over 95%!

There are other possible identifiers worth noting, including:

• Browser - 99% use Internet Explorer
• Browser Version - 89% use IE 7.0
• Flash Version - 80% use 14.0 r0
• Operating System - 99% use Windows

See the attached "Screenshot - Traffic Spikes & Inflated Bounce Rate".

Whether this is a negative SEO attack or something else, we're really hoping to get the community's input and (hopefully) possible solutions.

Thanks!

oYKrMu6

[KeriMorgret]

I'm about to run out the door, but take a quick look at this thread and the update he links to. There's a known issue out there with IE7 direct visits being really funky right now.

https://www.seroundtable.com/direct-traffic-ie7-analytics-18897.html

[ByteLaunch]

Keri,

Thank you for the response and pointing me in the right direction. It seems the fingers are being pointed at AdRoll as it was having websites in its ad exchange network drive invalid traffic to its advertisers' websites.

The thing is ... the client is not even an AdRoll advertiser nor do they have AdRoll's script implemented in the code. However, they did use Perfect Audience in the past and still have that script on the site.

I'll test removing the script and see what that does. In the meantime, I'll reach out to Perfect Audience to see if this is something they're also dealing with.

Thanks again Keri!

[KeriMorgret]

You're welcome. From the comments and the second post, it looks like this is being addressed by the ad providers, yet people are seeing another spike again in traffic in the past few days. Do take comfort that you're not alone and not being singled out!

[ByteLaunch]

Keri,

Happy belated Thanksgiving!

It's been about 3.5 months, so just wanted to give a quick update on this in case anyone else is still having this issue.

Unfortunately, we haven't really seen a solution to this but have improved our situation.

During the period of September 10-17, we contacted Perfect Audience to see if they were experiencing the same security issues as AdRoll. They confirmed that they too had seen some customers affected by this invalid traffic and so their engineers worked on modifying their tag to "no longer track IE7 traffic" and "blacklist all domains" that the traffic was coming from."

Unfortunately, this had no positive effect on our client's traffic issues.

Half-way through October, we saw invalid traffic spike once again into the thousands and stay there until around mid-November.

Half-way through November, the client migrated to a secure site (HTTPs), which actually made a notable difference in the invalid traffic, causing it to reduce down to, what we might consider, normalized numbers.

Although this seemed to help, unfortunately it still didn't completely address the problem. Today, we're still seeing IE7 as the top browser with 95% bounce rate.

At this point, we're just left to run filters to exclude the IE7 traffic until this essentially resolves itself (crossing fingers).