Is increased traffic from an emagazine feature potentially bot activity?

Recently we were featured in an emagazine article and ran some advertising with them where they retarget the article visitors with our product through Google.

Right about that time we had an increase in traffic (expected), but in GA none of it was converting.

In GA some of it is attributed to the emagazine, but most of it is showing up as “direct”.

I have HotJar and watched a lot of the session recordings from this particular landing page. Almost all of it is land on the page and about 60 seconds later leave. No scrolling or anything.

Has anyone else had this happen? Should I be worried about it?

TIA :slightly_smiling_face: