Why is there a sudden increase in direct traffic on my website?

[Grillo]

Hello,

in the very last days we noticed a sudden strike in direct traffic on both Shopify and Google Analytics. Traffic increased 5 to 10 times normal daily traffic. This is pretty weird as we are not running ads campaign at the moment, nor even new offline marketing campaigns or different from what we normally do. A newsletter is been sent, but number of users doesn't giustify such traffic.

Traffic looks "genuine" coming mostly from different cities in the Netherlands, where our business is located. New users are about 84%, with average time spent on the site 40 seconds and  bounce rate at about 80%.

Should I be worried about a spam attack?

Site url is: www.wake-style.com

Many thanks,

Federico

[David_Weru]

Hello, @Grillo 

As a precaution, you should ask if your domain provider offers protection against ddos attacks.

Most do, but if you're unsure, just contact their support.  It is a standard feature now so you should not expect an upcharge.

This is an example of such a service on its own 

https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/ddos/dns-flood-ddos-attack/

[Cyndiv20]

Hi,

I am having the same issue. All of a sudden a had a crazy spike of 3-4 times the visitors. We aren’t running any ads more than the norm. And same crazy bounce rate. Have you gotten any feedback from Shopify. I’ve reached out to my account manager and their unable to give me any information. Any feedback is appreciated.

thank you,

cyndi 

[ENL]

Hi, 

I've also had similar spikes in direct traffic - 3 times in the last 30 days.

It comes from countries outside of Europe (USA, India, Algeria) and always happens for a few minutes, no more.

My business is UK-based and all marketing activities are directed towards UK customers.

I believe they are bots as analytics show a 99.5% bounce-rate and an average session duration of 2 seconds for these sessions. 

Have you found a solution to your issue? Would be great if you could share any tip that could help us solve ours @Grillo . Thanks.

Best

[Juanpmurciabe]

Did you find the problem? I'm having the same issue, getting a lot of traffic but my ads are turned off

The traffic looks genuine as well but it's weird.

[RyanMalone]

Same issue here. x7 normal direct traffic since October 2022 and mostly zero second 100% bounce type traffic. No idea where it's coming from or how to stop it. It's completely messing up my analytics and reporting. 

[Maverickyeung]

Hi all, apologies for necromancing an old thread. But I also experienced this a while back and was looking to see if anyone experienced the same issue. Looks like a few others have also experienced this. Does anyone have a straight answer or guess as to why/how this happened?