If you are using Google Analytics to analyze your website traffic, you may have noticed an increase in your overall website traffic these last few months. While that is great, you may have been scratching your head as to why the new influx in traffic comes with a much higher bounce rate, a reduced time on site, and an extremely high drop-off on your home page.
Don’t worry; you were not the only one who was totally confused by the outcomes of these reports. KWSM: a digital marketing agency has numerous clients who rely on us for their website reporting, and we noticed this problem across the board.
The Cause: Amazon AWS Bots
After doing a deep dive and researching the root of the problem we found that most of the traffic from Ashburn is fake. Amazon’s AWS bots (and Hubspot) are visiting your website but leave without a trace. This is a problem because it is inflating your total sessions without contributing to the Google Analytics metrics you care about.
What You Can Do About This Fake Traffic
There is really nothing you can do to prevent this from happening. Usually, Google Analytics is fairly good at blocking and filtering out this type of website traffic, but it has dropped the ball for some time. We recommend double-checking that your settings are set to exclude bots and that you are filtering out bad traffic from Ashburn. Depending on how much website traffic you get, this could be inflating your reports by more than 50%, which can really throw off the measurement of digital marketing campaigns.
1. Double Check Your Settings are Excluding Bots
Go to your Admin page (located in the bottom right), under the third column called ‘View’ look for the tab that says ‘View Settings.’ When you click into that, you should see a section called “Bot Filtering.” Make sure that the box is checked to “Exclude all hits from known bots and spiders.”
2. Set Up a Filter to Exclude Fake Traffic
To set up a filter go back to the column called ‘View’ but this time click on the ‘Filters’ tab. Once you click on “Add Filter” you should be able to follow this screenshot set up to add the filter to exclude traffic from Ashburn, specific IP addresses, or other spam sources.
If you need help, please don’t hesitate to contact us.
Less than 60 percent of web traffic is human.
It is crucial for business owners to understand the website on their behavior to help make important business decisions. Our team of web experts will ensure that you are making your decisions on real data and will be able to help you make better, more informed decisions.
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