This has completely dumbfounded me and I don't know how to explain it. My website averages about 1000 visitors a day for the past few months. Then all of a sudden, it jumps skyhigh to 20k+ within just a matter of days. I don't know why and I wonder if anyone here might be able to provide an explanation. Screenshot of traffic over the last month: http://img407.imageshack.us/img407/97/51639046qj0.jpg Screenshot of traffic on 12/16 alone: http://img407.imageshack.us/img407/9035/11zi3.jpg The oddest thing of it all is that almost all of the traffic are direct traffic, which from my understanding is when people just type in the website directly. I wouldn't even be that surprised if most of the traffic came from referring sites, because maybe my site got mentioned on a major source which could bring in a hike of visitors. But that doesnt seem to be the case here and I have a hard time believing that nearly 20,000 people went to my site in one day by typing it in their browser directly. What reasons can there be to explain this?
Its the only explanation I could come up with, I mean, unless someone pointed a tonne of "paid traffic" like an autotraffic sender your way.... what was the activity on your site? did they have a high bounce rate? did they view other pages?
Could it be an error? Doesn't that logging have an option to check which sites they are coming from? Did you ask your hosting company?
I just checked the bounce rate, and in the 19,433 direct visit traffic, the bounce rate is 93% I think a 93% bounce rate pretty much means the traffic wasn't due to an offline source, because if people came to the site that way then they must be interested in it in the first place, not come and bounce. The average bounce rate for the direct traffic in the months before this is 64% I also checked my other sites with analytics and those do not seem to experience anything crazy like this, so that lessens the chance of an error with google.
this is weird and need to check with my own eyes what's the url? I'd be nice if you sharing the url here. I'm also want to know how good your website that's currently generating insane traffic
Is StumbleUpon counted as direct traffic? Not that that would explain such a high jump in visitors...
StumbleUpon shows up as the referring site in Analytics. Though, I would probably guess this has to be an error - some referring site is sending you traffic but Analytics isn't catching the referring url for some reason. At least I can't imagine a huge spike like that in direct traffic with such a high bounce rate. That bounce rate seems like Digg traffic, really.
Referral data is passed by the browser, unless 67% of your traffic is dropping the referral(its not), then you got a good amount of type in traffic. As its bouncing so fast I can only assume they came to take a look and then left, after hearing about it on some news source.
Are you still getting the 20k a week, did you update your seo? If so do you care to share what you think could have taken you over the top
did you set up some google adsense? doit right now! then invite me a beer ))) regards pal, im totally on the offline media explanation... maybe some magazine get your site on an article or something