I have been at this for years, just recently got involved with a new company. Anyhow, I have noticed we have a huge amount of direct traffic from China that shows up in Google Analytics. It shows up as direct so I cannot tell what the real truth here is. I do not believe it is real direct traffic for many reasons, I think we may be getting pop under or some other sort of spammy traffic. how would this work? Is there anyway I can figure it out....
Have already checked on the keywords, there is one that has chinese local sites although the traffic for those sites is negligible. I think the more telling fact is that for a month we will be getting 3000 visits a day then out of no where, nothing. Then a few days, or a month later, back up again. Never any conversions from this traffic of course. The vertical is an ESL school.
Is this traffic all coming from the same ip? Perhaps some China based bot is crawling your website but your analytics is mistaking it for a real user. A couple years back I noticed crazy spikes in my traffic like that, but I wouldn't get any extra conversions either. In the end it just disappeared and I assumed it was some type of bot/crawler.
Different networks and different cities throughout China with larger concentrations in the big cities. I honestly cannot figure it out. I know we have some partnerships with Chinese sites where we have a few banners. My best guess was, before I came here they sold the partnership with a promise to increase traffic, and since nobody here really knew much about it, the companies in China are sending it in shady ways. I do get referral traffic from the site we are on though which does lead to conversions, albeit rarely. Do you think if I could get access to a raw log of server hits that it may be able to tell me more than what GA is collecting?
Well if it is evenly spread out geographically like that, it sounds like the traffic is legit but low quality. My guess is those banner ads open in a new window causing Google Analytics to label it as direct traffic. Try digging deeper into those stats and see if they have normal browsing behavior. I don't think you would see much more if you analyzed raw logs instead of using Google Analytics. Usually GA helps make it easier to understand the stats.
Yeah, I was considering that maybe they are direct linking to our site somehow, maybe in a hidden frame or something? I will explore that idea a bit more. the weird thing is, it doesnt seem like they are going much of anywhere after getting to our site.
Is your website available in both Chinese and English? If the website was only in English that would explain why most people would just bounce.
Thanks for all the help in this thread, wondering if I can get some more.....Found out that the last person who was working here was basing performance on Alexa, this Chinese traffic started almost immediately after Alexa changed their ranking system last year. I think this, in an indirect way solidifies the idea that the person prior to I bought cheap Chinese traffic for the site. This is frustrating....no idea how to turn it off! Any ideas?