Huge Spike in Direct Traffic from IE7
-
Our site is seeing a huge spike in direct (none) traffic from IE 7 from July 8, 2014 - on. June 25 - July 7 showed 21 direct visits from IE 7; July 8 - July 20 is showing 5,889 (an increase of 27,943%). All traffic from the spike is going to our homepage.
Other Google Analytics' stats for this direct (none) IE 7 traffic:
Bounce Rate: 99.52%
Avg. Session Duration: 0:02
Pages/session: 1.01
Mostly all new usersWhat's strange is that the traffic is from a variety of cities and networks. What could be causing this? Has anyone experienced this before?
-
We have removed all of our adroll code - and seeing it start up as well.
-
I'm seeing a few reports on that in the comments of the SER piece at http://www.seroundtable.com/direct-traffic-ie7-analytics-18897.html, too.
-
Looks like the traffic has returned ...
-
Seeing the same thing from July 8th onwards for both companies, and both use/have used Adroll.
-
Adding a fresh reply here so people get notified in their inboxes (editing a previous reply doesn't generate a new email).
This is a problem with AdRoll and Perfect Audience, and both are aware of the problem (and invite you to contact them with any issues regarding your account). An update post is at http://www.seroundtable.com/adroll-invalid-traffic-18922.html
-
We saw the same significant drop yesterday, too. There have been some links to AdRoll and Perfect Audience mentioned in the comments sections of http://www.seroundtable.com/direct-traffic-ie7-analytics-18897.html. Both of those companies have made a response in the comments too.
-
Interestingly enough - today the # of these visits drastically decreased for some of our clients. Not totally gone, but significantly lower. Anyone else see something similar?
-
We're experiencing the same issue starting around the same time and ongoing. Seems to have happened in the past from what I've read but no one seems to have answers.
-
Keri - thank you so much for the update - I hope that Barry can all get an answer quickly!
-
Lots of people are seeing this at the moment. Still no reason has been identified, but you're not alone. Barry has a few more details on SER at http://www.seroundtable.com/direct-traffic-ie7-analytics-18897.html.
-
We have a client who is also experiencing the same thing - it looks like that this is happening to a lot of people now and in the past checkout:
and
https://code.google.com/p/analytics-issues/issues/detail?id=138
I can't seem to find a solution. The closest thing is setting up a filter like here: http://www.lunametrics.com/blog/2013/09/05/filter-bots-google-analytics/#sr=g&m=o&cp=or&ct=-tmc&st=(opu qspwjefe)&ts=1406181439 however, the service providers in GA are all generic.
Does anyone else have a solution?
-
I'm seeing the same direct traffic spike in IE 7.0. 1500 visitors/day. No clue why.
-
Thank so much! I think I will try CloudFlare out.
-
ADROLL is the one to blame: http://www.seroundtable.com/adroll-invalid-traffic-18922.html
If it isn't messing with your server services and just spiking in Analytics, I would just let it there and enjoy the (probably fake) traffic.
As there's actually no referrer and nothing tiding that traffic to a source, there's not much you can do aside of blocking some IPs.
You can also test-drive CloudFlare (very easy to setup, and free) which filter fake traffic (among other benefits) using known IP addresses and browser integrity checks prior to send the hit to your server.
-
Thanks for your response.
There isn't a specific location and/or network that stands out, which is really strange.
AT&T is up 14,050%, Time Warner is up 2,300%, Comcast is up 18,600% (all for direct IE 7 traffic).
California, Texas, Florida are all showing large jumps for IE 7 direct traffic, with CA being the largest. That's not surprising since we're a CA college system, but we're also not seeing a specific city responsible for the spike. It's spread out across LA, Fresno, Bakersfield, etc.
-
What location is it coming from? Sometimes you'll get a ton of traffic all from the same spot, and it winds up being some kind of bot or spam that's getting picked up. I'd check the network too.
-Adam
-
Thanks for the response.
I checked with my team, and to their recollection, nobody ordered a campaign that would have caused this. Our webmaster is reporting no server damage, either.
-
Have you signed up for any traffic exchange, affiliate program or similar? Purchased a service on fiverr or similar?
If those hits are not causing any damage to your server, then just ignore it... If it is causing damage, you might be a victim of a DDoS attack...
First, make sure you haven't ordered a service that results in that traffic, we'll go from there.
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
-
Dark Traffic Mystery!
Hey everyone, My team and I have been digging into this problem and can't find an answer - and it turns out this has been an issue for over year. I'll try to explain the best I can, but let me know if you have any questions. My predecessor noticed a non-existent page URL getting traffic in GA. He had the web dev team create a page so he could see where the traffic is coming from. The page has every directive under the sun on it; noindex, nofollow, noarchive, nosnippet, noodp, noydir, noimageindex, notranslate All of the traffic is (direct) / (none). It gets about 300 visits per day. Avg. time on page is 15:40, bounce rate is 99.6% and it doesn't show up in the funnel. Previous page path is 92% entrance; 8% homepage. Geo is 92% US; then diversified across countries. Browser is predominately Chrome. OS is only Windows, and device is only desktop. I've run this page through a backlink checker, and we get nothing. I've run it through Screaming Frog and it has no internal links pointing to it. I've tried putting quotes around the URL and googling it and we get a few websites, but they're very low authority and it isn't likely that they're sending 300+ visits per day. Also, since all of the traffic is direct, I don't think it's coming from a backlink anyway. This has become a personal quest for several of us, as we really want to figure out where that traffic is coming from. Any thoughts? What am I missing? It's kind of driving me crazy because I can't figure out what I've missed, so if anyone figures this out and is coming to Pubcon in November, I'll buy you a beer!! 🙂
Reporting & Analytics | | rachelmeyer0 -
Increase of direct traffic
Hi everyone, We have a weird issue in our Google Analytics account. We have enormous amount of direct traffic, but not to our homepage, but to blogs that are published and posted to facebook. e.g. yesterday we did a post and it received 3.500 visits of which 2.900 were direct.
Reporting & Analytics | | Loui-60570
I'm unable to figure out how this is possible. 90% of the direct traffic comes from mobile phones Anyone has an idea?0 -
Why My Site Got 1000% increase in organic traffic from day to night?
Did Google run any update Monday or recently? My site www.shirts4geek.com, strangely had a 1000% organic traffic increase from day to night. I didn't do anything in this site for long a time... but Monday I had a lot traffic coming from organic and every other day this week the site is doing extremely well on traffic and sales. I'm ranking first page for many keywords relate to my products. I wish I could figure out what happens so I can replicate it. The site has very links and the On Page Optimization is kind of basic. Does any have any idea how it could be possible? Have any one seen something similar lately?
Reporting & Analytics | | Felip30 -
Spike in Direct visits with Drop in Google Organic Visits
Does anyone have an explanation for why Google organic visits plummeted while direct visits rose the same amount. Total visits have been very normal. jI1Bn2B,UuzONNK kepV0eu
Reporting & Analytics | | phogan0 -
Strange Traffic / Viewed content in Analytics
Hi Im looking at the content viewed in December for a clients site and there's a high number of page views for some non-existent pages which received multiple hits eg. domain.com/dr-capability/ with 241 page views (54 unique page views) How can you have multiple page views (and many unique page views) for pages that don't exist ? Is it possible page is being generated automatically or something ? if so how come ? Any ideas as to whats causing this much appreciated ? All Best Dan ps - also many above average home page views
Reporting & Analytics | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
Amazon.com inc.increase in direct traffic
Hi All, I have seen a increase of direct traffic from hostname amazon.com inc. This only happened on one day. Any ideas what/why it is? Thanks
Reporting & Analytics | | Sayers0 -
Large Drop in Direct Traffic
We recently experienced a large drop in direct traffic. Search and referral traffic remained steady but direct traffic dropped by over half. I'm having trouble pinpointing what would have caused this drop. Any ideas or suggestions for investigating the cause in a drop of direct traffic?
Reporting & Analytics | | AxlsCloset0 -
301 redirects reduce traffic considerably
I recently identified an issue with our site whereby we had three different URL types for each article. As an example, we might have something like: /articles/my-article-name /articles/my-article-name.aspx /articles/My-Article-Name We've since taken action to address this by implement 301 redirects from the second and third formats to the first (so everything is without the .aspx extension and is in lower case). But the results have been disconcerting. Before the change, one of our articles receives 150 or so hits per day via the .aspx version. The other two existed but had very low traffic (1-3 per day). We decided the non .aspx and lowercase version was the version we wanted. Sure enough, when we introduced the 301 redirects on September 25th the traffic for the .aspx version just stopped (after a day) and the traffic for the non-.aspx version climbed. But not enough. After the change, the non-.aspx version is receiving about 60-70% of the traffic that we used to have on the .aspx version. So, instead of receiving 150 per day (to the .aspx version) we are receiving around 100 or so to the non-.aspx version. This pattern has occured across all our articles and, as a result, our site-wide traffic has dropped by about 40% or so. Since we are using 301 redirects I had assumed that the search engines would just update to reflect the non-.aspx version. I am sure I am missing something here. Any help would be most appreciated. Thanks. Mark
Reporting & Analytics | | MarkWill0