How to handle suspected spam traffic on my eCommerce store?

Technical Q&A
1

Hi there,

According to our GA4 data, around 99% of our Shopify store’s direct traffic is most likely spam - with an average engagement time of <1 second and only 4% of direct traffic coming from the UK (lots from the US, Netherlands, Poland etc). The UK is the only place we target and ship our products. Since 24/11/23 of 2175 direct sessions only 91 appear to be “real traffic”.

This is messing with:

  1. The accuracy of Google analytics
  2. The accuracy of our Shopify reporting
  3. And our “quota” based extensions.

Can you please investigate this traffic for me and block it from your end or provide recommendations to solve this? I have no visibility of IP’s etc from my end of Shopify and also no control over Cloudfare to block anything - this is all managed on the Shopify side.

Looking forward to your response.

2

It sounds like a bot crawling your site

As much as I discourage them, an IP / Location filter app might be a solution for you. There are a few in the app store to choose from.

You can limit traffic to UK based IP addresses. Please note that is may interfere with some beneficial bots like SEO scanners and tools, but it should do the job.

3

I’ve got the same problem. Did you resolve this?