Causes of Sudden Spike in Direct Traffic in Google Analytics
Do you see sudden and massive spikes in direct traffic?
If yes then is it just a couple of days event or do you see continue increase in direct traffic over weeks and months?
If it is just a couple of days event then following could be the possible reasons of sudden and massive spikes in direct traffic:
#1 Your brand/website was mentioned on a popular website or by an influencer with the massive social media following.
#2 Someone in your company ran ads on TV or Radio or did some other offline marketing activity which caused sudden and massive spikes in direct traffic. People will not automatically find your website and visit it directly. They find and visit your website in response to some marketing activity.
#3 Someone in your company ran a marketing campaign with incorrect UTM tracking parameters which resulted in a massive amount of direct traffic.
#4 Your website was attacked by a spam bot. If you see a sudden and massive spike in direct traffic with a bounce rate close to 100% and an avg. session duration close to 0 seconds, then most probably your website was attacked by a spam bot.
Get the E-book (52 Pages)
Get the E-Book (50 Pages)
If the sudden and massive spike in direct traffic continues for weeks and months then ask your following three questions:
#1 Has the overall website traffic increased in the last one month or is it just direct traffic which continues to increase week after week?
If overall website traffic has increased in the last one month and the direct traffic increased in proportion to the overall website traffic then the spike in direct traffic may not be a cause for concern.
It is common for most websites to have ‘direct traffic’ as one of their top five traffic sources. Whenever a referrer is not passed or is dropped because of security reasons, all such traffic is reported as direct traffic by Google Analytics.
However, if the overall website traffic has not considerably increased but direct traffic has relatively and considerably increased then check whether traffic from other marketing channels like ‘Google Organic’, ‘Email’, ‘Paid search’ has declined.
Maybe because of some changes being made to the tracking setup, Google Analytics is now reporting more and more traffic from other marketing channels as direct traffic.
#2 Have you recently made any changes to the settings of your Google Analytics property?
- Did you change the session timeout or campaign timeout setting?
- Did you change the User and event data retention setting?
- Did you make any changes to the referral exclusion list?
- Did you make any changes to the Search Term Exclusion List?
If the answer to any of the above question is yes then that could be the reason for a dramatic increase in direct traffic.
#3 Have you recently made any changes to the settings of your Google Analytics reporting view?
- Have you added or removed any view filter? Maybe you are no longer blocking internal traffic?
- Have you made any changes to the default or custom channels grouping?
- Have you made any changes to the definition of default marketing channels?
If the answer to any of the above question is yes then that could be the reason for a dramatic increase in direct traffic.
#4 What changes you made to your tracking set up in the last month?
- Did you make any changes to your cross domain tracking or cross device tracking?
- Is Google Analytics tracking code firing correctly on each page of your website?
- Did you make any changes to the way you tag your URLs? Maybe you stopped auto-tagging or made some changes to your UTM parameters?
If the answer to any of the above question is yes then that could be the reason for a dramatic increase in direct traffic.
#5 Has your website recently started getting a lot of traffic from spambots?
The Spam Bots actually visit websites in order to send fake traffic (mainly fake referral traffic). These bots can crawl hundreds and thousands of websites every day and send out HTTP requests to the websites with fake referrer header.
They create and send fake referrer headers to avoid being detected as bots. The fake referrer header contains the website URL which spammer wants to promote.
To find referrer spam in Google Analytics follow the steps below:
#1 Navigate to ‘Referrals’ report in your GA view.
#2 Change the date range of the ‘Referrals’ report to the last three months.
#3 Sort the report by bounce rate in descending order.
#4 Look for referrers with 100% or 0% bounce rate and 10 or more sessions. They are most likely spam referrers.
#5 Make a note of all of the spam referrers whose traffic you want to block from your Google Analytics view.
#6 Once you have identified spam referrers, block them from visiting your website again.
To learn more about spambots, referrer spam and how to block them, read this article: Removing referrer spam and fake traffic in Google Analytics – Tutorial
Related Articles:
- What is direct traffic in Google Analytics & why is it so high?
- How does direct traffic work?
- Difference between direct traffic and referral traffic
- Why is direct traffic increasing and how to fix it?
- How to reduce Direct Traffic in Google Analytics?
- How Google Analytics attributes conversions to Direct Traffic?
Do you know the difference between Digital Analytics and Google Analytics?
99.99% of course creators themselves don’t know the difference between Digital analytics, Google Analytics (GA) and Google Tag Manager (GTM).
So they are teaching GA and GTM in the name of teaching Digital analytics. They just copy each other. Monkey see monkey do.
But Digital analytics is not about GA, GTM. It is about analyzing and interpreting data, setting up goals, strategies, and KPIs.
It’s about creating a strategic roadmap for your business.
Digital Analytics is the core skill. Google Analytics is just a tool used to implement ‘Digital Analytics’.
You can also implement ‘Digital analytics’ via other tools like ‘adobe analytics’, ‘kissmetrics’ etc.
Using Google Analytics without a good understanding of ‘Digital analytics’ is like driving around in a car, in a big city without understanding the traffic rules and road signs.
You are either likely to end up somewhere other than your destination or get involved in an accident.
You learn data analysis and interpretation from Digital analytics and not from Google Analytics.
The direction in which your analysis will move will determine the direction in which your marketing campaigns and eventually your company will move to get the highest possible return on investment.
You get that direction from ‘Digital analytics’ and not from ‘Google Analytics’.
You learn to set up KPIs, strategies and measurement framework for your business from ‘Digital analytics’ and not from ‘Google Analytics’.
So if you are taking a course only on 'Google Analytics’, you are learning to use one of the tools of ‘Digital analytics’. You are not learning the ‘Digital analytics’ itself.
Since any person can learn to use Google Analytics in a couple of weeks, you do no get any competitive advantage in the marketplace just by knowing GA.
You need to know a lot more than GA in order to work in the digital analytics and marketing field.
So what I have done, if you are interested, is I have put together a completely free training that will teach you exactly how I have been able to leverage digital analytics to generate floods of news sales and customers and how you can literally copy what I have done to get similar results.
EXCLUSIVE FREE TRAINING...
"How to use Digital Analytics to generate floods of new Sales and Customers without spending years figuring everything out on your own."
Here’s what we’re going to cover in this training…
#1 Why digital analytics is the key to online business success.
#2 The number 1 reason why most marketers are not able to scale their advertising and maximize sales.
#3 Why Google and Facebook ads don’t work for most businesses & how to make them work.
#4 Why you won’t get any competitive advantage in the marketplace just by knowing Google Analytics.
#5 The number 1 reason why conversion optimization is not working for your business.
#6 How to advertise on any marketing platform for FREE with an unlimited budget.
#7 How to learn and master digital analytics and conversion optimization in record time.
My best selling books on Digital Analytics and Conversion Optimization
Maths and Stats for Web Analytics and Conversion Optimization
This expert guide will teach you how to leverage the knowledge of maths and statistics in order to accurately interpret data and take actions, which can quickly improve the bottom-line of your online business.
Master the Essentials of Email Marketing Analytics
This book focuses solely on the ‘analytics’ that power your email marketing optimization program and will help you dramatically reduce your cost per acquisition and increase marketing ROI by tracking the performance of the various KPIs and metrics used for email marketing.
Attribution Modelling in Google Analytics and Beyond
Attribution modelling is the process of determining the most effective marketing channels for investment. This book has been written to help you implement attribution modelling. It will teach you how to leverage the knowledge of attribution modelling in order to allocate marketing budget and understand buying behaviour.
Attribution Modelling in Google Ads and Facebook
This book has been written to help you implement attribution modelling in Google Ads (Google AdWords) and Facebook. It will teach you, how to leverage the knowledge of attribution modelling in order to understand the customer purchasing journey and determine the most effective marketing channels for investment.
Himanshu Sharma
Digital Marketing Consultant and Founder of Optimizesmart.com
Do you see sudden and massive spikes in direct traffic?
If yes then is it just a couple of days event or do you see continue increase in direct traffic over weeks and months?
If it is just a couple of days event then following could be the possible reasons of sudden and massive spikes in direct traffic:
#1 Your brand/website was mentioned on a popular website or by an influencer with the massive social media following.
#2 Someone in your company ran ads on TV or Radio or did some other offline marketing activity which caused sudden and massive spikes in direct traffic. People will not automatically find your website and visit it directly. They find and visit your website in response to some marketing activity.
#3 Someone in your company ran a marketing campaign with incorrect UTM tracking parameters which resulted in a massive amount of direct traffic.
#4 Your website was attacked by a spam bot. If you see a sudden and massive spike in direct traffic with a bounce rate close to 100% and an avg. session duration close to 0 seconds, then most probably your website was attacked by a spam bot.
Get the E-book (52 Pages)
Get the E-Book (50 Pages)
If the sudden and massive spike in direct traffic continues for weeks and months then ask your following three questions:
#1 Has the overall website traffic increased in the last one month or is it just direct traffic which continues to increase week after week?
If overall website traffic has increased in the last one month and the direct traffic increased in proportion to the overall website traffic then the spike in direct traffic may not be a cause for concern.
It is common for most websites to have ‘direct traffic’ as one of their top five traffic sources. Whenever a referrer is not passed or is dropped because of security reasons, all such traffic is reported as direct traffic by Google Analytics.
However, if the overall website traffic has not considerably increased but direct traffic has relatively and considerably increased then check whether traffic from other marketing channels like ‘Google Organic’, ‘Email’, ‘Paid search’ has declined.
Maybe because of some changes being made to the tracking setup, Google Analytics is now reporting more and more traffic from other marketing channels as direct traffic.
#2 Have you recently made any changes to the settings of your Google Analytics property?
- Did you change the session timeout or campaign timeout setting?
- Did you change the User and event data retention setting?
- Did you make any changes to the referral exclusion list?
- Did you make any changes to the Search Term Exclusion List?
If the answer to any of the above question is yes then that could be the reason for a dramatic increase in direct traffic.
#3 Have you recently made any changes to the settings of your Google Analytics reporting view?
- Have you added or removed any view filter? Maybe you are no longer blocking internal traffic?
- Have you made any changes to the default or custom channels grouping?
- Have you made any changes to the definition of default marketing channels?
If the answer to any of the above question is yes then that could be the reason for a dramatic increase in direct traffic.
#4 What changes you made to your tracking set up in the last month?
- Did you make any changes to your cross domain tracking or cross device tracking?
- Is Google Analytics tracking code firing correctly on each page of your website?
- Did you make any changes to the way you tag your URLs? Maybe you stopped auto-tagging or made some changes to your UTM parameters?
If the answer to any of the above question is yes then that could be the reason for a dramatic increase in direct traffic.
#5 Has your website recently started getting a lot of traffic from spambots?
The Spam Bots actually visit websites in order to send fake traffic (mainly fake referral traffic). These bots can crawl hundreds and thousands of websites every day and send out HTTP requests to the websites with fake referrer header.
They create and send fake referrer headers to avoid being detected as bots. The fake referrer header contains the website URL which spammer wants to promote.
To find referrer spam in Google Analytics follow the steps below:
#1 Navigate to ‘Referrals’ report in your GA view.
#2 Change the date range of the ‘Referrals’ report to the last three months.
#3 Sort the report by bounce rate in descending order.
#4 Look for referrers with 100% or 0% bounce rate and 10 or more sessions. They are most likely spam referrers.
#5 Make a note of all of the spam referrers whose traffic you want to block from your Google Analytics view.
#6 Once you have identified spam referrers, block them from visiting your website again.
To learn more about spambots, referrer spam and how to block them, read this article: Removing referrer spam and fake traffic in Google Analytics – Tutorial
Related Articles:
- What is direct traffic in Google Analytics & why is it so high?
- How does direct traffic work?
- Difference between direct traffic and referral traffic
- Why is direct traffic increasing and how to fix it?
- How to reduce Direct Traffic in Google Analytics?
- How Google Analytics attributes conversions to Direct Traffic?
Do you know the difference between Digital Analytics and Google Analytics?
99.99% of course creators themselves don’t know the difference between Digital analytics, Google Analytics (GA) and Google Tag Manager (GTM).
So they are teaching GA and GTM in the name of teaching Digital analytics. They just copy each other. Monkey see monkey do.
But Digital analytics is not about GA, GTM. It is about analyzing and interpreting data, setting up goals, strategies, and KPIs.
It’s about creating a strategic roadmap for your business.
Digital Analytics is the core skill. Google Analytics is just a tool used to implement ‘Digital Analytics’.
You can also implement ‘Digital analytics’ via other tools like ‘adobe analytics’, ‘kissmetrics’ etc.
Using Google Analytics without a good understanding of ‘Digital analytics’ is like driving around in a car, in a big city without understanding the traffic rules and road signs.
You are either likely to end up somewhere other than your destination or get involved in an accident.
You learn data analysis and interpretation from Digital analytics and not from Google Analytics.
The direction in which your analysis will move will determine the direction in which your marketing campaigns and eventually your company will move to get the highest possible return on investment.
You get that direction from ‘Digital analytics’ and not from ‘Google Analytics’.
You learn to set up KPIs, strategies and measurement framework for your business from ‘Digital analytics’ and not from ‘Google Analytics’.
So if you are taking a course only on 'Google Analytics’, you are learning to use one of the tools of ‘Digital analytics’. You are not learning the ‘Digital analytics’ itself.
Since any person can learn to use Google Analytics in a couple of weeks, you do no get any competitive advantage in the marketplace just by knowing GA.
You need to know a lot more than GA in order to work in the digital analytics and marketing field.
So what I have done, if you are interested, is I have put together a completely free training that will teach you exactly how I have been able to leverage digital analytics to generate floods of news sales and customers and how you can literally copy what I have done to get similar results.
EXCLUSIVE FREE TRAINING...
"How to use Digital Analytics to generate floods of new Sales and Customers without spending years figuring everything out on your own."
Here’s what we’re going to cover in this training…
#1 Why digital analytics is the key to online business success.
#2 The number 1 reason why most marketers are not able to scale their advertising and maximize sales.
#3 Why Google and Facebook ads don’t work for most businesses & how to make them work.
#4 Why you won’t get any competitive advantage in the marketplace just by knowing Google Analytics.
#5 The number 1 reason why conversion optimization is not working for your business.
#6 How to advertise on any marketing platform for FREE with an unlimited budget.
#7 How to learn and master digital analytics and conversion optimization in record time.
My best selling books on Digital Analytics and Conversion Optimization
Maths and Stats for Web Analytics and Conversion Optimization
This expert guide will teach you how to leverage the knowledge of maths and statistics in order to accurately interpret data and take actions, which can quickly improve the bottom-line of your online business.
Master the Essentials of Email Marketing Analytics
This book focuses solely on the ‘analytics’ that power your email marketing optimization program and will help you dramatically reduce your cost per acquisition and increase marketing ROI by tracking the performance of the various KPIs and metrics used for email marketing.
Attribution Modelling in Google Analytics and Beyond
Attribution modelling is the process of determining the most effective marketing channels for investment. This book has been written to help you implement attribution modelling. It will teach you how to leverage the knowledge of attribution modelling in order to allocate marketing budget and understand buying behaviour.
Attribution Modelling in Google Ads and Facebook
This book has been written to help you implement attribution modelling in Google Ads (Google AdWords) and Facebook. It will teach you, how to leverage the knowledge of attribution modelling in order to understand the customer purchasing journey and determine the most effective marketing channels for investment.
Himanshu Sharma
Digital Marketing Consultant and Founder of Optimizesmart.com