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:
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.
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.
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
