My analytics data is confusing me

[Frog]

I am using woopra analytics on a newish site that I bought from TB solutions I have put some content on the site. There are maybe 10k words on the site over a handful of posts.

I am watching the site traffic, its obviously low at the moment but something I am seeing is thatt he traffic is almost always showing as "direct or local bookmark" which means they are not coming via search. Now the interesting thing i that these people are coming to posts which I have just made in the last 24 hours and there are no direct links or redirects to these posts therefore they cannot possibly be typing the URL in or using a local bookmark.

I did read somewhere that a number of people who come to the site and show up as "direct" can actually be from search engines and I am trying to understand why this is and if there is an accurate way of telling whats going on?

I am not expecting to make a load of commission yet and job 1 is massive content but at the same time I am curious about this traffic I am getting.... can anyone help shed any light on this "direct" traffic?

 

[Ryuzaki]

The first thing I'd suspect, based on the time frame of the traffic, is that it's bot traffic. Are you filtering for bots, ghost host names, referral spam, etc?

 

[Frog]

no - is there any easy reading on that you can recommend?

 

[Akamai]

You need to filter the bots through robots.txt

Another possibility is that your stat counter may be counting your own IP as a visit through page previews and such as you're editing/publishing?

 

[LinkPlate]

The first thing I'd suspect, based on the time frame of the traffic, is that it's bot traffic. Are you filtering for bots, ghost host names, referral spam, etc?

I concur. Robots. I bet that your bounce rate is 100% for that traffic

 

[Giovanni]

no - is there any easy reading on that you can recommend?

Go into your analytics and navigate to settings and check the box that says filter known bots. This only accounts for a very small percentage unfortunately. The referral spam can be filtered out by going to the filters menu and creating a new filter. When creating a new filter choose "Exclude domain" and enter the domain that is sending referral spam traffic. This should help clean some of your analytic data up.

 

[Jason Abbot]

This may or may not be too advanced for you, but I'd recommend taking a look at your server logs for days that seem to be affected. Server logs are the ONLY 100% accurate detail of who/what is visiting your site and you will be able to definitively tell if a ton of bots are visiting your site, and then spin up the appropriate lines in your robots.txt to deal with them.

Taking a cursory look isn't too difficult, but feel free to ask me some questions on how to do so if you're stuck!

 

[Frog]

I know its not my IP and it looks like a portion of thet traffic is good as they are browsing the site and coming in with a google referrer which I know in itself is not 100% accurate but it seems more viable than a direct hit to the site which leaves a comment.

Would robots really help with this? I would not have thought spam bots etc would respect instructions in a robots file?

 

[senty4love]

@Frog I highly suspect its bot traffic..whenever i set up new analytics I always follow this guide [ i can't post link but search 'digitaldart analytics for shopify' ]