In the past month, Google Analytics has been reporting a few hundred direct visitors a day to one of my sites whereas previously I was getting 10 a day. Does anyone know what Analytics counts as a direct visitor as opposed to a referring site, search engine etc.? I can't believe 400 people are typing in the site URL in their browser address bar all of a sudden.
You understand it right. If google reports 400 people as direct visitors, it is trying to tell you that 400 people wrote your URL in the browser. This might happen if you released a print ad, or perhaps someone wrote an article about your site. I suggest you keep an eye on the stats whether it remains or not. If direct visits go sharply up and then sharply down, it is highly possible there is nothing wrong with Google Analytics, but you got an ad somewhere. Or someone mentioned you in the offline world. If numbers remain very high, you might want to contact google's support team to check their algorithm.
I've noticed this when someone tweets on of my posts. Thats the only thing I can account an up in 'direct' visits for anyways....
yah same thing happen to me ... i have a new site (two month) with consistent 90-120 UV thru SE, but lately (last three day), my direct visitor number increase by 1000%, about 100+ direct visitor and 90% of it is bounce ..... today i have around 300 direct visitor but half of it came from same location (belgium, brussels), bounce rate is 100% ..... I wonder where the traffic from ? cause my is 100% local classifieds site ....
If Google Analytics can't figure out where a visitor came from, it calls it direct traffic. Maybe there's some new source with a convoluted link that Google can't figure out???
They are probably bad bots -- check your logs, they show up with no referrer, and sometimes with the UserAgent as a "bot". The bad bots don't check your robots.txt file and eat bandwidth. Alot of them are looking for email addresses, some of them are site scrapers, others "say" they are "search engines" You can deny them through your .htaccess -- yet, you almost have to update it everyday! I have a programer friend who is working on a software program that will automatically update your .htaccess file with new deny's -- he's working out the kinks right now. Anyway, they have really been bad (the bad bots), the last 3 weeks or so. They have ruined my EPC's (they click on affiliate links too!). Anne
i think so, bad bot, they back again, just two hour pass i received 35 visit again how to block them and how to trace their IP ?
Thanks Anne, Sounds plausible, I'll check my logs. It's strange though, Analytics doesn't report huge jumps in the number of page views - which I might expect if a robot was scraping all the pages on each visit for example. I've always found AWStats to be relatively poor compared to Analytics at differentiating between human and non-human visitors. I hope Analytics isn't going the same way. It's ruining my visitors/ sales ratio calcs for the last month. Brian
just check with analytics, it seem like everytime they visit different page .... shit man i have over 8000 page, anyone can help ?