Dont know where increased hits coming from

[ketanco]

Hello,
In the recent couple weeks, the unique hits I am getting increased by almost 100%, from around 150 a day to almost 300 a day. I am not complaining but I dont have any idea where they are coming from. I was just updating my site as usual and I checked the site statistics and backlinks and did not see anything out of ordinary or added. Any ideas how did this happen?

[opifex]

Is something in your site "seasonal" content? Holidays can always affect you. Look at the content of the most visited pages and any new keywords being used to find you... that should give you a clue.

[ketanco]

no nothing seasonal. and as far as keywords, i am not yet in the first results for the keywords I wanted, (except when you combine two words but those visits are too few). The funny thing is, the google adwords income did not increase in the same proportion. So I am assuming that most of the new visit are form bots right?

One more related question: When a webmaster says "i have so many unique hits per month" would these unique hits include the possible bots visiting the site like in my case? Or how can someone know people hits or bot hits to a site?

[svidgen]

When a webmaster says "i have so many unique hits per month" would these unique hits include the possible bots visiting the site like in my case?

Depends on the webmaster. In my humblest of opinions, "unique hits" is a meaningless phrase. Measuring "hits" in general is pretty meaningless--a "hit" is just an HTTP request, which includes images, scripts, and stylesheets. Perhaps the webmaster meant to say "unique visitors."

[ketanco]

but how does he know how many of unique visitors are visitors and how many are bots?

[ptejada]

If he uses Google Analytics he will know the source of the traffic, if he is not using Google Analytics he should start installing it right now.

[ketanco]

okay i have google analytics, and can not see which hits are bots and which hits are real people... how or where to see them?

[ptejada]

I you just made your Google Analytics your past traffic is not going to be there of course.

Otherwise,
Enter to your Google Analytics account
Click View Report for the site
Click Traffic Source on the left panel
Under Traffic Source in left panel click 'All Traffic Source'

You should see line Chart and list of your traffic source as well as the amount of traffic form each source. You should be able to figure out which are bots.

Also take a look at the unique Visitors Overview.

[ketanco]

sure i have it for a long time and I looked at it. okay, the majority of them (like 60%) is direct traffic/none with average page visit of 1.13 pages and a visit length of 16 seconds with a bounce rate of 89%. I guess the majority of these would be defined as bots correct? why might I have so many direct visits any ideas?

[ptejada]

I don't know if Google analytics count bots as visits. Direct traffic can mean a lot of things and not just bots; User may have your site bookmarked, Has a shortcut on desktop, form browser history and lot more. Trust me, no bot will take 16 seconds on your site.

Google Analytics is one of the best tools for any personal web developer, and its surprisingly free. Analytics has a lot of useful information, for example there is section named 'Length of visits' in Visitors > User Loyalty > Length of Visit
Here you can see the percentage of the visits length. If Analytics count bots visits then this visits should be in the range of 0-10 seconds. If more than 40% of visits are 0-10 seconds you have a problem either way; too much bots crawling your site or your content is not impressing your visitors.

My site is a few months old, and 68% of my traffic is direct and i have decent stats when it comes to unique visitors and their visit length. With 1,722 visits and 905 Unique visitors. If you do the math more then 60% of my direct traffic cant bet bots.

Direct Traffic Isn't bad at all.

[ketanco]

Thanks for the info I appreciate it. By the way, how were you able to generate such a big number of unique hits (I am assuming you are saying 905/day) in just a few months?

[ptejada]

Originally Posted by ketanco

Thanks for the info I appreciate it. By the way, how were you able to generate such a big number of unique hits (I am assuming you are saying 905/day) in just a few months?

Nah...jeje, I wish. I get am average of 55 visits per day. 905 is the overall number of unique visitors. The Overall site Visits is 5,000+, so you can assume that i have some Returning visitors of those 905 Unique Visitors.

[svidgen]

My site is a few months old, and 68% of my traffic is direct and i have decent stats when it comes to unique visitors and their visit length. With 1,722 visits and 905 Unique visitors. If you do the math more then 60% of my direct traffic cant bet bots.

Google Analytics collects its data via JavaScript. Bots won't run it, and neither will 1 to 10% of your visitors (depending on your audience).

Hopefully, we won't see the day when bots start running JavaScripts and filling out forms ... they haven't started doing this yet, have they?

[ptejada]

Originally Posted by svidgen

Google Analytics collects its data via JavaScript. Bots won't run it, and neither will 1 to 10% of your visitors (depending on your audience).

Hopefully, we won't see the day when bots start running JavaScripts and filling out forms ... they haven't started doing this yet, have they?

I'm Afraid i believe they do, Before i had bots registering into my forums and even posting advertisements in my forums. And i haven't got one of those in months since i implemented an anti-bot system in the registration form. Incredibly the bots were able to decrypt the captcha image and register.WOW. i know...

[svidgen]

Ah yes. I wasn't even thinking of that type of bot ... sorry. I had my head stuck on legitimate bots (crawlers). If there is a way to rule out bot-generated requests, I'm confident that Google Analytics has integrated that logic. And I am still pretty confident that most bots will not effectively run JavaScript--but I would be interested in performing an experiment if I can get some participation.

... Basically, I'd need some help getting inbound links to a set of test pages, from which I we could present forms and scripts in a few different ways. I think that within a few weeks to a few months, we could see "exactly" what capabilities the typical bot has--possibly see a count or percentage of how many bots have which capabilities and so forth.

Obviously, if I were to host this, I'd receive the slight benefit of increasing visibility for my domain (svidgen.com). If folks are OK with that, I'd be interested in a project like this.

Anyone be interested?