A Sudden Spike in Bounce Rate and Users

[vivekrpatel]

I've observed a massive spike in the bounce rate and users for one of our clients from Sep 29th. There is no drop in ranking.



What could have caused the issue? What action can be taken?

I've checked and nothing found suspicious.

Hostname
Visitors from countries
Language

 

[Cherie Dickey]

That seems like a lot of direct traffic... is your client running a marketing campaign offline? Email blasts?

I would dig deeper into that metric to see if that's where the pike is coming from. It could also be spam judging by the bounce rate and session duration. If that's the case you'd need to take steps to filter it out.

 

[mborgelt]

Cherie is absolutely right I would check to see if your client is running any other offline efforts that may be boosting this. Also, check the average session duration and use the Geo filter to isolate sessions. Odds are, if it is spam, it will all be coming from one location and have an unrealistic session duration.

 

[vivekrpatel]

Hi @Cherie Dickey and @mborgelt

Thanks for the quick response.

We are not doing a marketing campaign offline, Email blasts. I believe this is spam as we are getting the traffic from the same Browser Firefox version 45.0.247. I filtered it yesterday and it seems to work.

However, I found a couple of suspicious service providers (data on 16th Oct), not sure, but looking at the bounce rate it could be spam.



The interesting thing is we are getting traffic from different locations (data between 29th Sep to 15th Oct), but blocking the Firefox version 45.0.247 all the traffic came from different locations has been blocked.



Let me know what do you think.

 

[mborgelt]

With 1 page viewed and an average session duration of less than one second we are definitely looking at some type of spam.

 

[Cherie Dickey]

I agree that this has to be spam. Filtering the browser is a good first step, but I'd be concerned about the browser version changing.

This might be a rabbit hole, and it's not possible to do in Analytics, but I'd be looking into ways to find the IP addresses and see if there's a similar pattern as the browsers. Logically if the traffic is coming from the same browser version, it might also be coming from the same IPs. I wonder if your web hosting provider might be willing to help?

 

[vivekrpatel]

I agree that this has to be spam. Filtering the browser is a good first step, but I'd be concerned about the browser version changing.

This might be a rabbit hole, and it's not possible to do in Analytics, but I'd be looking into ways to find the IP addresses and see if there's a similar pattern as the browsers. Logically if the traffic is coming from the same browser version, it might also be coming from the same IPs. I wonder if your web hosting provider might be willing to help?

Yes, I'm going to ask the web hosting team for the IP address.

Thanks to both of you for your help on this @Cherie Dickey @mborgelt