I'm facing website direct traffic-related issue on my website, how to solve it? I'm having a huge number of direct traffic on my website. But, I'm not able to know that from where traffic is approaching, like which source or website. I want to know the source of traffic generating on my website? Can anyone help on how to track this traffic? Can you recommend any Tool or some other way to know the source of traffic? Due to direct traffic, the stats of my website are here: https://www.screencast.com/t/p3wxkLdJAL
Google Analytics will report any traffic as "direct" if there's no data on how the session arrived at your site: https://moz.com/blog/guide-to-direct-traffic-google-analytics More likely than not it's bot traffic. If you're on cPanel type "visitors" in the search, then click on the visitors icon. Choose your site, then look under "User Agent". A regular visitor should look something like: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 13_3 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) CriOS/79.0.3945.73 Mobile/15E148 Safari/604.1 A bot will look something like: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; bingbot/2.0; +http:/ /w ww.bing.com/bingbot.htm)
In line with what qwikad says, if your web host allows you access to the server logs you may be able to identify where the traffic is coming from. Our host has "Webalyzer" installed and we get a full list of user agents. It's also a good tool to identify and block bad bots (using .htaccess) that contribute to false traffic numbers.
Lots of sudden direct traffic is 99% bots, unless your website got a mention on some news channel or something of that sort which spiked interest of people. I am guessing the latter did not happened, or did it? Use cpanel or open your raw access logs file and check IP range from where traffic is coming. If its a single IP, or or handful of IPS in a small range, then definitely bot. Like @qwikad.com mentioned use the useragent string to identify the bot, good bots will give a useragent to identify themselves. If its something desirable, keep it, or else block the IP.
Modern browsers will hide the referrer when the website is using HTTPS (SSL). Since most websites today use HTTPS, it will cause referrals to be sent without a referrer header. A SEO trick to enable your website's referrer to be visible in Google Analytics is to include the following a meta tag: <meta name=referrer content=unsafe-url> Warning: Google does not advise to use the value unsafe-url. Instead, it advises to set an advanced setting that matches your website. The following document provides exact information: https://web.dev/referrer-best-practices/ The referrer value can be insightful. For example, an analytics service might use the value to determine that 50% of the visitors came from example-domain.com instead of reporting "unknown referrer". But when the full URL including the path and query string is sent in the Referer across origins, this can be privacy-hindering and pose security risks as well. Take a look at these URLs: Enabling the referrer header can provide a marketing advantage since referrals of most other websites will show as (direct) or unknown.