Seeing massive spikes in direct traffic with 100% bounce rates

[Whittie]

Hi all,

Looking through Analytics yesterday, I saw that my website had a huge increase in direct traffic in sessions. However, they apparently spent 0 seconds on the website in total so that raised plenty of red flags.

Does anyone have reasons why this might be? Spam or bug?

Thanks in advance!

[TomRayner]

Hey

Could be web crawlers and othet bots.  You can jump in and take a look for yourself:

In GA, click on the Audience Tab, then Technology, then Network.

This will then list all of the ISPs that have visited your site.  I'm pretty confident that you will find the culprit in there.

Now, if you're thinking - this is skewing my reporting, I don't want it in there - you can block that referrer in your GA report.  Here's how you do it:

First - always make sure you keep an unfiltered version, just in case something goes wrong.

In your filtered view, go to the Admin Tab, select the view you want to edit, and then click on filters.

Click "add a new filter", then add a new filter like this:

http://i.imgur.com/6WBhyJA.jpg

Here, I am blocking Google's crawler. To block any other, all you'd need to do is to take the service provider name that you find in the technology -> network report and add it into that filter field (the brackets and ^ icon make it an exact match filter).  You can verify the filter before you apply it, and from therein that ISP will be removed from your report.  It won't retrospectively apply the filter, however.

Hope this helps.

Tom

[GPainter]

You can go to

Acquisition>referralsto find out where they might be coming from.I can imagine a lot of the visits are from GA code ghosting which is from sites like free-share-buttons.com etc. these can be filtered out of your reports etc. if it bugs you. Its a bit of a problem of late and bugs the heck out of me. Let me know if it is a lot of spammy looking referrals

[Carloseo]

Hi Whittie,

The unusual spike on direct visits is most likely because of ghost spam, check your referrals and see if you see free-social-buttons or something similar (there might be others), this spammer has been hitting with fake direct visits along with the referral. To be sure this is spam go to:

Acquisition > Channels > All traffic > Select Hostname as a second dimension

You will probably see a fake hostname or not set. Also, if you check the landing page they will be  "/" and the page title "Home Page" instead of the title of your real home page.

The problem with conventional methods of stopping spam is that they will just take care of the referral part. The best solution for ghost spam is to use a filter that includes only your hostnames. This will stop ghost spam in any form referral, organic, page and even the fake direct visits.

You can read this article for details about this specific issue and the valid hostname filter.

http://www.ohow.co/unusual-increase-in-direct-traffic-on-ga-spam/

Hope it helps,

Whittie