US traffic falsely inflating traffic figures and bounce rate.

[themegroup]

Hi fellow Mozzers!

We're handling the digital marketing for a UK-based franchise of a Canadian SaaS company, and I've noticed that a large proportion of their traffic has been coming from the US (not the majority, but enough to skew the figures).

The Canadian arm of the business deals with the US market, but the majority, if not all, is direct traffic which seems to suggest they've seen the web address somewhere (not sure where though). Is there a search-friendly way to move this traffic back to the Canadian site? I know I can set up a filter for US traffic so it stops distorting the stats we're seeing (which I have now done), but my worry is this is causing a high bounce rate that may be impacting Google's perception of the site quality. The traffic has a 100% bounce rate (not surprisingly), so if we could find a best practice way of sending them to the Canadian site, that would be great.

My first thought was a screen that appears for US traffic prompting them to the Canadian site, but presumably this would still count as a bounce as they're only on one page?

Any help much appreciated!

Cheers guys,
Nick

[Carloseo]

Hi Nick,

I'm assuming you are seeing that on Google Analytics. First of all you don't need to worry about ranking on Google since they don't take into consideration any metric from GA. Here is what Matt Cutts says about it.

Second there is a good chance that this spike of direct traffic is caused by spam, check your referrals and see if you find free-social-buttons or any other unusual referrer. If you do, then that is the cause of the high bounce rate.

To stop the spam, you should create a filter based on your hostnames in GA. Excluding USA won't do much since the spam can com from many countries including Canada. If you need more information, this article will help you,

Unusual spike of direct traffic (Spam)

Hope it helps,

Carlos

[themegroup]

Hi Carlos.

Thanks for the quick response. We've certainly told our clients historically that, while bounce rate is something to bear in mind, it doesn't impact rankings and on certain pages is the only real outcome (depending on what the page is aiming to achieve).

But the more I read, the more it implies it is a stat that can have an impact following the various Google quality algorithms - and I see this video is from 2010, so I'm guessing the situation may have changed by now?

As for the link to the tutorial on spamming, very useful, I'll look into where they're coming from.

Assuming there's no impact on either organic or PPC, I'll set up a filter and leave it at that - but it would still be useful to have a best practice way to send this traffic, if it's real, to the proper geographic site.

Nick.

[Carloseo]

There are few other reasons why bounce rate from Google Analytics doesn't affect ranking if you think about it not everyone uses GA, so that wouldn't be a fair measure. Another reason is the spam, most of it doesn't even get to your page, so there is no interaction whatsoever leaving fake data, and by now Google is more than aware of it.

However, you are right, as you mention the algorithm Google uses is complex and constantly evolving, so there might be another way to measure the time spent on your page after a search, for example, the back button of the browser.

So we can split it if the high bounce rate comes from fake traffic/spam in GA, then there is nothing to worry about. If it is from valid traffic, then it shouldn't be taken lightly since Google might be using other ways to measure it rather than GA.

Again Google knows the one and only truth, so we can only make educated guesses based on what we see

Carlos