Direct Traffic from Ashburn, VA
-
We've seen a huge spike in traffic form Ashburn, VA every Monday. It's wrecking our analytics.
I don't want to create a filter based on location because we should receive legitimate traffic from that location. I see there are a few other identifiers that make me think I could add a filter for just those items (iOS 5, Safari).
Does anyone have a current best-practice for this type of problem? Tx!
-
Hi fishlizzer!
Did Peter's advice help? If so, please mark one or both of his responses as a "Good Answer."
-
Well - you can see on monday traffic from US, VA, Ashburn that spike in Monday.
Go in GA, site, Audience, Geo, Location, US, VA, Ashburn. Then add secondary dimension - Browser and later Browser version. And start looking for monday patterns. Once you see spike you need go back in your http web log and find full user agent.
For now there is one good news - if bot can be seen in GA then this mean that bot execute JS for sure. Because there are bots that can't execute JS but make "parasite" traffic. There are also bots that didn't visit your site but make "fake" visit only in GA too.
-
Any suggestions on how to identify bot user agent? I don't want to block something that should be indexing / crawling the site using the .htaccess file. But, I'd like to be able to filter it from Google Analytics.
-
The usual suspect is "Amazon Datacenter":
https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/global-infrastructure/Since this datacenter is hosting many bots (Even Roger - MOZ bot was there!) you must identify bot user agent and see why this happens. Most bots follow robots.txt protocol so you can disable them scanning your site.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Paid traffic or "Paid Search" is not showing in my Google Analytics
Hi, I have two campaigns running in Google Adwords or Google Ads now and I saw in Google Ads account that I had 5 clicks today (09/18/2018) but when I try to search for this clicks in my Google Analytics in ACQUISITION > All Traffic > Channels I don't find nothing about "Paid Search" or something like that. Bellow is a picture of my Google Analytics account to prove it. The accounts are linked and I can find the 2 campaigns in the Analytics. How can I interpret this picture? Where the paid traffic is showing? or not showing there? Thanks Leandro uvAtrsg
Reporting & Analytics | | lmoraes0 -
Drop of traffic after massive technical issue
Hello,
Reporting & Analytics | | SharonEKG
since August i am working on a customers website on WordPress who has a costume made theme, back in October after updating some plugins we had a massive breakdown and the website went up and down and had technical issues for over a month and traffic was completely gone for a while, since we have dropped to about 40% of the monthly traffic the website was getting prior, i was waiting to see if the website will recover since we were getting some traffic and are ranking but that did not happen, is there a way to tell if there are any code issues or anything that can cause that drop? moz crawler only indicates normal meta description errors but nothing in the code, changing the theme would probably be best solution as a popular premade theme would give a definite answer but that is not possible.0 -
Universal Analytics - is it awarding traffic incorrectly ?
A few days ago deployed a new site. A funny thing happened within one day. Google Analytics commenced reporting Organic traffic as lifting by 25%. At the same time Google Analytics commenced reporting that direct traffic dropped by 25%. All other traffic sources remained at the same level. This is all being reported through GA Universal. Has anyone experienced this before? Any advice is appreciated. Also noted that with Google Webmaster is reporting, since the day of the new site deployment, a 40% drop in impressions and click. Reported referrals on this deployment day also went through the roof. All of the Google tools I am depending on are not supporting my discovery of a solution to this. If anyone has been through this on universal analytics or traditional analytics please help! Offering lots of good karma points in return. Cheers.
Reporting & Analytics | | Oxfordcomma0 -
Mobile redirect causing traffic drop? Can I move analytics code to capture them as visitors before redirecting them?
Yesterday I implemented a mobile redirect as I don't have a mobile version of my site. As a result I've seen a drop in traffic which makes sense as my redirect script is at the top of the page. If I were to move the redirect script below the analytics code would that allow me to still track mobile users? Would this affect my bounce rate though?
Reporting & Analytics | | SamCUK0 -
What will you do when seeing the rank and traffic are dropping?
No black-hat SEO strategy was adopted, so we suppose it's not a penalty, but ranks and organic traffics are dropping. What will you do in this situation? And how long it takes for you to make sure it's not a normal flux, but something wrong happens on your site? Thanks in advance
Reporting & Analytics | | JonnyGreenwood0 -
Impressions up 120%, but traffic not up that much. Why?
Since the penguin update near Oct 6th, both landing page & query impressions are up 120%, but google traffic is actually down 4.89%. CTR is down 45% but we didn't change any of the meta tags on our site. Any ideas why impressions would be up and traffic down? And / or how CTR could decrease without making any edits to the meta data for our pages?
Reporting & Analytics | | nicole.healthline0 -
No (Not Provided) Traffic
Hi All, I have a site that gets around 500,000 visits every month from the UK and US, but funny enough the number number of visits under (not provided) traffic is only 179 per month. For most websites I usually get 10% or 15% of the traffic under not provided, what could the reasons be for such a low percentage of (not provided)? Thanks, Carlos
Reporting & Analytics | | Carlos-R0 -
How to measure number of visits from Google News coming from Google Universal Search (NOT referral coming directly coming from news.google.com) with google analyitcs
I'm running a news site, and I have a problem of accuratly measuring which traffic is REALLY coming from google news. I analyzed a lot of individual articles and I come to the conclusion, that the visits, that come from the google news section in the universal search results are counted as "normal" search engine traffic in google analytics. So if you do a Google search for a topic that includes links from Google news, you don't get an accurate referral count. As an example, if you do a search for "eBay", incorporated into the page 1 search results you may also see Google news results as well.
Reporting & Analytics | | Mulle
If someone clicks on that Google news link that appears in Google search, it shows up in Google analytics as a referral from Google search, when it was actually from a Google news referral. I was already checking google analytics and google news help forums and searched SEO blogs for this. But I wasn't able to find a working solution. Can anybody help me out with this problem? Thanks so much, Matthias0