Strange referral traffic in Google Analytics

[rashedethical]

Hi everyone,

Google Analytics is reporting a lot of referral traffic from strange places. It's around a third of my total traffic, but I've never seen a transaction from this traffic. I suspect it's bot traffic, but is there a way to check which bots/sites are causing this? Is this something that I should be worried about? Can it be stopped? What would you do if you saw this traffic in your Google Analytics? I've added the referrals below: 

referral / 4242
referral / 4220
referral / 4256
referral / 4249
referral / 4221
referral / 4241
referral / 4251

Thank you

[soleseriouss]

well, to understand it better, can you share the screenshot of the referral traffic coming to your website? 

[rashedethical]

Here you go:

[PageFly-Victor]

Hi @rashedethical,

This is Victor from PageFly - Shopify Page Builder App.

Although I can't give you an exact answer about where the traffic comes from, I have some suggestions for you while investigating it:

1- Are you running ads? You may check into your ads set-up to check if the URL is having any additional part

2- Are you running any referral program or using any app for it? There may be auto-generated links for referral program

3- Check the landing page of the traffic: If you see unusual traffic to a particular page, it can be a clue 

4- Change the secondary dimension to Country: If it comes from any particular country, it can be bot traffic

5- You can exclude a particular group of audience from your Google analytics report by going to Settings > Account > All Filters

I hope those suggestions would be helpful. If there are any points I can elaborate on further, let me know!

Victor.

[rashedethical]

HI Victor,

Thankyou for the suggestions. I've looked into them below:

1 - I've checked all our paid social ads and they have the correct UTM tracking on them. Our Google Ads are set up to get tracked automatically by Google Analytics

2 - We don't run a referral program

3 - All the traffic is going to the homepage

4 -  The traffic comes from multiple countries and devices.

5 - I've excluded these referrals now, which will help to clean up the data in Google Analytics. But it still doesn't clear up why/where this traffic is coming from.

Regards

The

[PageFly-Victor]

Hi @rashedethical ,

You may check the network domain as well from Landing page report

and Acquisition > Referrals > Add secondary dimension Source / Medium

That’s all what I can think of now for finding the reason, hope it helps!

Victor | PageFly

[rashedethical]

Thankyou for your help Victor 🙂

[PhoebeHeck12]

I have the same problem.

1. The referral traffic all goes to the homepage.

2. It comes from many countries.

3. The bounce rate is very low, like 20%

  I don't know why and I didn't find the reason in other SEO tools. 

[EvaJulia]

We have exactly the same problem. It started on January 28th and the daily traffic is pretty much consistent but only stopped on March 1st. LP ist homepage, the country is Germany (which is our main market), only from desktop and mostly windows operating system. We have no idea what it is. The time on site is high, bounce rate low but now interactions or events take place.

[heypegi6]

I have had my shopify store for exactly one year. Traffic has slowly built but there is one town that huge numbers of visits come from, comparatively. It is Council Bluffs, Iowa. I have had 2,380 visits in the last year from them and not one single visit from Omaha, Nebraska, directly across the river.. Also, I have not seen one single sale from that location. I have noticed most visits are during the week. I sell digital art as well as canvas prints and posters. I just find these unbalanced numbers very strange. About 6 months ago I did run Pinterest ads but have not run with anyone else. I am puzzled and also am wondering if this could be something that can cause more trouble down the road. Peggy

[nitsa1]

Council Bluffs is Shopify analytics, harmless but can screw your data of course.