If you have recently been reviewing your Google Analytics reports and data, you have seen a large spike in traffic. “Awesome!”, you say. That is, until, your SEO team sees increased bounce rates followed by less time spent interacting with your site and large amounts of drop-offs at the homepage. You may be asking yourself “Why all the traffic from Ashburn VA?” .. “What does this mean?” Fortunately, the answer is glaringly obvious: web crawler bots from Amazon!
As it turns out, the influx of traffic coming from this source is fake. The AWS bots from Amazon’s datacenter in Ashburn, VA are visiting websites and leaving almost right away. This is seen even on CI Web Group’s own website in our analytics images above. This is not entirely uncommon, though, as the very nature of these bots are what make search engines work. They visit websites and index pages so that they may be ranked in search engine results. The unfortunate side effect is inflated reports with rather meaningless information when it comes to your website.
Unfortunately — not a whole lot. There are some recommended settings you can enable to try and filter out the bad traffic. We are of course here to help, but just in case, here’s what you can try:
Found on the bottom right of the Google Analytics page, go to Admin. Click View, then View Settings. This page will contain a section called Bot Filtering. Make sure to check the box that says “Exclude all hits from known bots and spiders”
Go back to the View column. Now click the Filters tab, then Add Filter. Name the filter, select the Custom button, select Exclude, then change the dropdown to City. In the Filter Pattern box type Ashburn.
Less than 60% of web traffic comes from real people. Understanding the traffic your website is receiving is crucial in business decision making. Don’t wait, reach out to us today to help you make sense of the digital world.
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