Easy Furniture Web Tip 207: Ghost Analytics Wreckers

Furniture World News Desk on 4/6/2015

By Katherine Andes

In the last year, I've noticed that clients sometimes get unusual spikes in traffic in their Google Analytics. I looked at one of them yesterday and there were 50 visits lasting less than a second each.

When I looked deeper into the report, I saw that those visits came from sites like “semalt” and “darodar.” You may have noticed visits from those sites in your own analytics in the past year.

Most of these sites are sending bots or spiders to your site in order to either get links back to their sites when your company publishes certain logs (which most small companies don’t), or they want you to click on their links so they get more traffic to their sites.

Actually, it’s more complicated than that, but it’s the best I can do to briefly explain so you won’t panic when you see those weird spikes in traffic and weird referrals.

If you want to get into the weeds on the matter, check out these two articles: What is Referrer Spam and How to Stop It by Carlos Escalera and Ghost Referrals by Nick Baker.

For small furniture companies, these phony visits are annoying. It makes you look like you have more traffic than you actually have by spiking the number of visits. At the same time, it makes your web pages look like they are performing poorly because it looks like folks just came to your site and immediately left (high bounce rate).

Easy Furniture Web Tip 207: If your web traffic has unexplained surges in traffic and high bounce rates, be aware that you may be the victim of ghost analytics wreckers.

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Katherine Andes specializes in web content development and copywriting for SEO — including page customization for storefront and franchise web sites. Visit her website BetterWebSales.com or phone her at 559.589.0379.

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