![]() The spike could also be as a direct response to a marketing activity that your brand initiated, for instance, an ad that links back to your website. “Short term spikes in direct traffic can be attributed to your brand being mentioned on a popular site or by a popular influencer with a significant following,” says Patrick Crane of Love Sew UK, “The mention can drive lots of traffic your way resulting in an upsurge of direct traffic numbers. One of the best causes of a spike in direct traffic is a viral social media post or press mention. However, if you are seeing a big spike in direct traffic one day and then it repeats itself twice more over the next month, it might be caused by a big press mention. In addition, is the traffic spike a one-time thing or is it becoming a pattern?Ī one-time traffic spike that lasts for a day might be caused by a spambot. From there you can continue to dig deeper to look for the root cause.” How often are traffic spikes occurring? ![]() The channel with the most traffic will likely be the culprit. “I find that the best way to identify random spikes in Google Analytics is to isolate the dates of the spikes and then drill down to take a look at the traffic channels,” says Jeff Webster of ClicksMarketing. When did the traffic spike occur?ĭirect traffic with a short spike (a day or two) is much different than a spike that lasts for a week or longer. To get a better understanding of what’s causing a spike in direct traffic, ask the following questions. The former is where I usually focus my attention, though, as this can be a canary in the coal mine for bad data.” Most of the time, it’s the latter two and this is a good thing. A piece of PR that causes people to directly search my name -A viral piece that gets a lot of dark social shares on Slack or email lists that don’t UTM tag links. This is a tracking bug and you have to root out the cause and fix it. And this can lead to the erroneous conclusion that this advertising action is giving somewhat worse results than those actually achieved.”Īlex Birkett adds, “Sudden spikes in direct traffic can be a few things: -A tracking or campaign tagging error that causes other traffic sources like social, organic, or email to be bucketed under direct. Let’s look at an example: if it turns out that the visits achieved through a link inserted in a banner instead of being considered traffic achieved through a campaign is (wrongly) identified as direct marketing, it will be producing a distortion of the data. The link to the website that has taken the user to our page is inside a document in Word, PDF, PowerPoint, etc. In webmails such as Gmail, Hotmail, or Yahoo mail, the server’s name appears in the origin of the visit. Visits from users who have accessed by clicking on a link located in an email if an email application configured on the device itself is used. In addition to traffic from users who actually type the URL directly into the address bar, Google Analytics also considers direct traffic: Links saved as favorites. Leszek Dudkiewicz of Passport Photo Online explains, “The confusion and spikes in direct traffic come from a different interpretation by Google Analytics of the same concept of “ direct traffic.”
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