Our organic homepage traffic just recently spiked from about a typical under 20 per weekend to about 820 -- what could be causing this?

[marketingdepartment.ch]

Website: http://www.myinjuryattorney.com

Our homepage typically receives under 20 organic visitors per weekend, but I just checked traffic this morning, and it was at a whopping 821 for just Saturday and Sunday. It's already at 212 this morning.

I'm heavily assuming this is fake traffic as there were about 818 drop offs after visiting the homepage, an 84.41% bounce rate, and an average session duration of 5 seconds. Our typical metrics -- last weekend for example, were: 13 visitors to the homepage, 38% bounce, and an average session duration of 1 minute 26 seconds.

Does anyone know who or what could be causing this? Could it be a competitor using negative SEO of some sort? Thank you in advance.

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

Hi Rick,

If you connected Google Search Console to your site you should be able to see in the Search Analytics data what kind of keywords did trigger the traffic. It could always be fake traffic but sometimes you just get lucky with certain keywords that you appear to rank for all of a sudden.

Martijn.

[matt.nails]

Sounds like you are experiencing "Referral Spam". Have you checked the sources in Google Analytics? It is essentially a spammy way of advertising domains and services.

Here are a few links to help you understand and fix the issue:

1. https://moz.com/blog/how-to-stop-spam-bots-from-ruining-your-analytics-referral-data
2. If you have GA: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1034842?hl=en

Good Luck,

Matt

[marketingdepartment.ch]

Hi Matt, thanks for the quick answer! All of this traffic is actually showing up under our organic rather than referral

[marketingdepartment.ch]

Hi Martijn,

I'm checking now and for some reason it's not reflecting the high # of visitors. All of the queries also seem normal, and it's showing that none have been repeated over 5 times. There are however a ton of different, but pretty normal ones appearing. Any additional insight given that info? Thanks!!

[matt.nails]

I noticed a few months ago, that type of traffic was not just showing up under referral but also under organic in GA. As far as i am concerned, just another problem plaguing GA/GWMT.

Matt

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

Have you checked the landing pages that relate to the keywords? In that case you would hopefully be able to see what kind of pages are trending at the moment and increasing your traffic. A big increase in traffic might have an influence, but in the end 800 searches more daily are not that much.

[brettmandoes]

Hi Rick,

Try checking your traffic against the secondary dimension "hostname". If a large number appear to be invalid hostnames then you've got yourself an answer. Referral traffic, also known as ghost spam, can be removed with an include filter. Moz wrote a great guide on how to do this here: https://moz.com/blog/stop-ghost-spam-in-google-analytics-with-one-filter

If you're at all concerned that the traffic could be ghost spam and you don't have this filter in place, then an easy means of checking is to implement the filter on a test view and see how it impacts your data. Just make sure you create a new view to test it on first, because I had a client accidentally exclude all of his valid hostnames and lost every last bit of actionable data.

Hope this helps!

[marketingdepartment.ch]

Hi Brett,

Thank you for the info. Would all of this still apply if the traffic is considered organic and not referral?

[brettmandoes]

Yes, because this filter is based on the hostname. If a bot is spoofing the source but does not have a valid hostname (and most will not) then it will be filtered out by the include filter. Go into your GA data, go down to the source/medium report under acquisitions and set the secondary dimension to hostname.

If you're seeing something like (not set) next to Google/Organic traffic in the source then that's spam. I've got some in my unfiltered views as well. From the article I sent you:

"On the other hand, valid traffic will always use a real hostname. In most of the cases, this will be the domain. But it also can also result from paid services, translation services, or any other place where you've inserted GA tracking code."

So just make sure you compile a list of all the valid hostnames for your website and you should be fine.

[marketingdepartment.ch]

Hi Brett - thank you! Do I have this set up right? I'm just seeing normal sources from what I can tell. https://www.screencast.com/t/t9VW5tSz

[brettmandoes]

Not just yet. Click on the secondary dimension drop down bar and type in hostname, or find it under the behavior bar. You can also look at just google traffic by clicking on Google first then setting the hostname as the secondary dimension. It should become apparent at that point if you have a lot of bots spoofing your traffic with a fake source.

[brettmandoes]

Hi Rick,

Since I haven't seen a response yet, I'm assuming I wasn't clear enough in my explanation so I went into an unfiltered view for one of my clients and found some ghost spam, then skitched it so you could see how to get there and examine it yourself on your website. Hope this helps!

F0jKftb

[marketingdepartment.ch]

Hi Brett - I was able to go into this filter and I didn't see anything out of the ordinary.

[marketingdepartment.ch]

https://www.screencast.com/t/2lPmQO4BI

[brettmandoes]

Hi Rick, sorry for the hiatus, I have a couple other questions for you.

1. Have you set up conversion tracking? Has there been an increase in conversions?
2. Do you have any campaigns running? Print, broadcast, radio, etc.? Many offline campaigns cause a boost in organic searches for my clients.