Direct traffic is up 2100% (due to a bot/crawler I believe)

[WebGain]

Hi,

The direct traffic to website www.webgain.dk has increased by over 2100% recently. I can see that most of it is from US (my target audience is in Denmark and the website is in danish).
What can I do about this? All this traffic gives my website a bounce rate of 99.91% for direct traffic. I believe it is some sort of bot/crawler.

2100percentboost.png

[atakala]

It's probably AWS, which is amazon buyable crawl service.
If ıt costs you too much then try to ban it.

[randfish]

It's weird that the bot is accepting cookies, but with a bounce rate that high, I agree it's probably something automated (though it could be people who were looking for something else or were directed there by an email or an app accidentally). You can look through your logs to see IP addresses and then do as Atakala says and block the traffic if you're worried about bandwidth. You can also just filter it out in GA by excluding US traffic (if your'e worried about analytics being messed up).

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

I would check the service providers first just to know for sure they're all coming from the same provider. You can check this by visiting your Audience > Technology > Network report on the left side of your Google Analytics. If you see the same network and browsers being used I would use a filter (only if you're really determined/ 100% sure that it's bot traffic) to get them completely out of your Google Analytics view.

[PaddyDisplays]

I was having the same problem ( for me it seemed to be Bings ads bot) .  I used this guide below and it seems to filter out most of the bot visits.

http://www.lunametrics.com/blog/2013/09/05/filter-bots-google-analytics/#sr=g&m=o&cp=or&ct=-tmc&st=(opu qspwjefe)&ts=1403614027

[LesleyPaone]

If you are running Wordpress also check what page / pages are being accessed. I have had bots nail my wp-login like that before. If that is the case harden your installation, one thing I have found that stopped it was setting a deny in the htaccess on wp-login / wp-admin.

[WebGain]

Thank you for all your great advice. I will follow them and see how it works.

[WebGain]

Follow up: I have fixed this now. It was a monitoring tool by Digicure, where I have signed up to be a beta tester. Their platform checks the website like a normal visitor from servers around the world (in my test case it is Denmark and California) and thereby it looked like normal direct traffic in my data. I excluded their stated server IP-addresses in my Google Analytics filters and that helped. Thanks again guys for the help.

[KeriMorgret]

You might want to let them know about this, so they can add in documentation so future users know what is up before panicking.

[WebGain]

Already done. They also included the tip in their newsletter for beta-testers.