Once morning you wake up, you check the weekly/ month traffic to your website and see a rise in the session graph. You’ll feel happy: business is taking off. Or should you? Well depends on the kinds of traffic you get.
In this case turns out I got a lot of spam traffic to the site I administer. It is simple to figure out if your site is plagued with spam traffic. One way is to go to your traffic referrals. You can almost instantly identify the referral spams as these spammers are distinguishable by their names! (hint: seo, traffic, rank, cash, share, button, porn…) Traffic from them is always accompanied by 98- if not 100% bounce rate and 0s average session duration. Another way is to check the hostnames, or the resolutions of the devices your traffic is using to access your website. A value of (not set) often gives away the ghost/ spam traffic.
Spam traffic is not only terrible for your analytics as it badly distorts the data and consequently impacts the strategic business decisions. Many of them are also spam bots that crawl your site, use up your online resources and compromise user experience to potential customers. Better get rid of them before they ruin your online business.
