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I've previously used statcounter, which does a great job. I'm looking to start tracking with google analytics as well, but it seems to be way off.

I tried to figure out the cause of the discrepancy and it looks like google is counting each page view times 5,10 or sometimes even more. For example, this is a site I barely use. I accessed it at 11:00 today. Instead of showing just 1 hit from me, its showing 10 users as having gone to the site

http://screencast.com/t/GT29OKzG

Similar things are happening with my other sites as well.

Do I have some weird setting turned on?

Pebbles
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1 Answers1

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The unusual spike on direct traffic is most likely caused by spam, lately spam like free-share-buttons and similars, have been hitting with fake direct visits along with the referral.

The usual way to stop the spam by adding a filter for the referral won't work on this case since the fake direct visits will still go through.

To stop the fake direct traffic and any form of ghost spam, referral, keyword, page... you can use a filter that includes only your valid hostnames. You can find more information about this solution here

https://stackoverflow.com/a/28354319/3197362

And more details on the fake direct traffic issue here:

http://www.ohow.co/unusual-increase-in-direct-traffic-on-ga-spam/

Hope it helps,

Community
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Carlos Escalera Alonso
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  • I dont think thats it. Most of the traffic coming in is direct traffic. This is for a brand new site that I just purchased a few days ago. I wouldnt expect there to be much spam coming in yet, but the google analytics numbers are just so wrong. – Pebbles May 28 '15 at 23:29
  • Pebbles if you check the articles you will see that it doesn't matter if the site is new or old, the spam doesn't have any interaction with your site all happens on your reports in GA. The spam doesn't even need that the tracking code of GA is active, it just enough if it's created. Here is a similar situation like you have http://webmasters.stackexchange.com/a/81193/49561. And here is a case where the site was fresh and private and got hit by spam http://superuser.com/q/895219/283616 – Carlos Escalera Alonso May 29 '15 at 09:02