rawTOP
05-04-2008, 10:32 AM
I've seen a couple cases in Google Analytics stats lately that look like there's bot traffic executing the GA scripts. Was wondering how common this was... Neither of the cases is with my site - just with other sites I'm permissioned to see GA reports for...
In one case a blogger friend has seen his direct traffic (which is most of his traffic) drop to less than half of what it was two weeks before. He swears nothing has changed other than he hasn't been posting as much, but the drop was over 2 or 3 days and then leveled off... Curiously he's one of my biggest referers and I've seen an increase in referrals from him despite the fact that he's got half the traffic on his site... Doesn't make sense unless he's not telling me he had bots set up to inflate his stats...
In another case I'm seeing affiliate traffic come into some hosted blogs and two affiliates have very different traffic patterns than the others. For starters, lots of traffic, but for certain of the blogs the characteristics of their traffic is completely different than everyone else's traffic - much lower bounce rates, and much higher click through rates to the tour. But then there are other blogs where the same affiliate sends completely normal looking traffic. I'm thinking it's more than just the fact that their traffic is better suited for some sites than others... It feels like bots...
So the question is how much have you seen (or suspected) bot traffic messing with your stats? I could see log file based stats being messed with, but to mess with Google Analytics stats requires they execute Javascript, which is a step above just crawling a site...
In one case a blogger friend has seen his direct traffic (which is most of his traffic) drop to less than half of what it was two weeks before. He swears nothing has changed other than he hasn't been posting as much, but the drop was over 2 or 3 days and then leveled off... Curiously he's one of my biggest referers and I've seen an increase in referrals from him despite the fact that he's got half the traffic on his site... Doesn't make sense unless he's not telling me he had bots set up to inflate his stats...
In another case I'm seeing affiliate traffic come into some hosted blogs and two affiliates have very different traffic patterns than the others. For starters, lots of traffic, but for certain of the blogs the characteristics of their traffic is completely different than everyone else's traffic - much lower bounce rates, and much higher click through rates to the tour. But then there are other blogs where the same affiliate sends completely normal looking traffic. I'm thinking it's more than just the fact that their traffic is better suited for some sites than others... It feels like bots...
So the question is how much have you seen (or suspected) bot traffic messing with your stats? I could see log file based stats being messed with, but to mess with Google Analytics stats requires they execute Javascript, which is a step above just crawling a site...