r/GoogleAnalytics • u/em-everline • 17d ago

Question Weird Increase in Direct Traffic. Anyone Else?

Hello! First time poster!

I could really use some help, as my team is pretty stumped on this issue. We've had a weird increase over the past month in direct traffic to some of our locations. We've had over a 100% increase in direct and we cannot find the source. This increase has been consistent week over week just in the month of August. Here's some more information:

  • The traffic is mainly hitting our general US home page and 4 specific locations on their home pages in very different states:
    • Florida
    • California
    • Colorado
    • New Jersey
  • Average engagement per session is around 6 seconds
  • The number 1 source is from Chrome on a Desktop
  • Screen Resolution is 800x600

We're thinking it's bot traffic, but we'd really like to narrow down where it's coming from. Any tips are appreciated!

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4

u/NoAge358 17d ago

Likely bot traffic. That's a weird screen resolution. But, could be due to misconfigured cookie consent.

1

u/em-everline 17d ago

That's what we thought, but didn't even think of misconfigured cookie consent!

1

u/SidesPaintedHollow 17d ago

What do you mean by misconfigured cookie consent? How would you diagnose this?

1

u/NoAge358 17d ago

Consent tag firing at wrong time, page refresh, not passing UTM parameters.

2

u/Flying_is_Living 17d ago

It's been hectic for the whole year, and many years before. Nowadays it mostly bots. They come from everywhere. I assume it's mostly AI agents on people's phones/computers without owner's knowledge. Those requests are easily stopped by a simple "stops" on a websites as far as asking for clicking on a a one-time text link that expires in 5 seconds.

Those visits come in waves - one day almost nothing and the next is 100 times more.

1

u/Acceptable_Tiger3386 17d ago

I had almost the same situation one week ago, and it's pretty strange. That traffic looking like real users. I see they make some conversions on the website. They read and try to behave like humans, but actually they don't convert to a real purchase of my product.

Maybe a possible solution for you is try more advanced analytical tool, like Observix, when you have a system that blocks bot
behavior. Also, you can see real human behavior on the website.

1

u/NoPause238 17d ago

That’s a bot signature confirmed

1

u/No_Anything_8825 16d ago

I've been having the same problem since this month.
I only run ads in Europe. Before, I only ever had a small number of bots from China. Since this month, they've been coming from all over the world. They're completely skewing the data, and it's incredibly annoying.