Massive spike in direct traffic for months

Technical Q&A
1

Since mid-October (15th October 2022 to be exact), I’ve had a massive spike in direct traffic (as in 700% more than it was previously). I had originally noticed it on Google Analytics and thought maybe my tracking code was broken or duplicated somewhere - but I’ve noticed the numbers are high in the Shopify reports as well.

I’m at a loss to find out the cause, the only thing I can think of is a bot, or redirects causing issues. My site transferred over to Shopify in August so doubt redirects would suddenly become a problem in October. The other potential causes I can think of would be the GDPR popup but don’t think it’s that, or perhaps Klaviyo popup forms? We’ve had them for a long while so again not sure how or why it would change suddenly, only thing I can think is that they added the teaser button that allows you to have the pop-up reappear if you close it by accident (and want to take advantage of signup benefits).

Wondering if anyone has a suggestion on what I could do to narrow down the cause further?

These sessions are mainly 1 page, 00:00:00 duration.

2

Hi @RyanMalone

One thing to check would be the “hostnames” property in Google Analytics.

In Google Analytics if you check Source > Direct traffic, then add “Hostname” as a secondary dimension it might give you an idea if traffic is coming from any kind of subdomain or shopify admin link? You should see (in an ideal world) 99.9% of direct traffic coming from your own domain.

Has any other traffic source/medium dropped considerably over that time?

Just a couple of things to investigate - it’s difficult to diagnose.

3

Thanks, 99.98% from my domain, with the 0.02% from my test.domain.

No noticeable slumps around the same time. Biggest change was cpc down but product_sync going up.