Sudden surge of visitors

[BrendonA]

I woke up seeing that I've more normal visitors than usual and it remains the same till now. It currently shows that I have around 30+ guests when my usual guest numbers do not hit more than 10 without advertising on social medias.

I'd used google adsense to see the real time stats but it doesn't tally at all (the numbers were far off). Could it be that the guests I'm having now are spam bots or something of that sort?

Is there a way to see what the guests are doing on my forum? I clicked on the members online now and saw that most of the guests are viewing threads but I can't seem to know which particular thread they're looking at. Is there a way to know? And what are your thoughts on the current surge of visitors on my site?

 

[Moshe1010]

Check IPs and google them.

 

[Ridemonkey]

Do you have Google Analytics installed? If not, you should. It would let you see where the users are coming from - we will frequently get spikes in user visits, and with Analytics, I can check the landing pages (what triggered the interest?) and source pages (who sent them?). Often we'll find that, for example, a link got popularized on Reddit or something.

 

[craigiri]

Google analytics had some problems a couple months ago when they showed double the usual visitors. They even admitted it. I thought my other measurement service (quantcast) was wrong, but it turned out to be goog.

It's good practice, IMHO, to use both and make sure they are within a couple percent of each other. If not, something is wrong.

 

[BrendonA]

Do you have Google Analytics installed? If not, you should. It would let you see where the users are coming from - we will frequently get spikes in user visits, and with Analytics, I can check the landing pages (what triggered the interest?) and source pages (who sent them?). Often we'll find that, for example, a link got popularized on Reddit or something.

Yes, I have google analytics installed. However, I'm seeing my forum statistics now and it's showing 53 guests while on the other hand, looking at the analytic's real time stats which shows only 1 active user (me). What happen to the other 50+ guests? Are they robots or?

 

[Ridemonkey]

Ignoring the real-time active users for a moment, what do your traffic stats look like? You posted this on Monday so you should have multiple days of traffic stats to look at. Are your page views up from last week? What are the landing pages for those views? What is the source for those landings?

 

[BrendonA]

Ignoring the real-time active users for a moment, what do your traffic stats look like? You posted this on Monday so you should have multiple days of traffic stats to look at. Are your page views up from last week? What are the landing pages for those views? What is the source for those landings?

How do you check the source for landings? Anyway, I don't think the analytics stats tally as I'm looking at around 10 sessions on monday when I'm having 50+ guests per hour on the forum stats.

It is highly likely that they are bots, but how can I deal with them?

 

[Ridemonkey]

How do you check the source for landings? Anyway, I don't think the analytics stats tally as I'm looking at around 10 sessions on monday when I'm having 50+ guests per hour on the forum stats.

It is highly likely that they are bots, but how can I deal with them?

Well, you can either check your sources directly under Acquisitions > Channels, and do some comparisons against previous weeks (to see if, say, you are getting more Google search traffic), or you can see if you can correlate your actual landing pages against certain sources. Behavior > Site Content > Landing Pages, then add a secondary dimension of Acquisition > Source. Again, you need to be comparing these things against previous periods.

If I do that latter item and then sort by "Absolute change" I see that my site got linked on a news site somewhere and I have a few hundred hits from them that I didn't have last month.

If they are actually bots, and they're not registering accounts and causing spam, ignore them IMO.

 

[BrendonA]

They seem to be registering but I'm using the captcha which seems to be stopping them from registering. However, I've deleted around 3 of them at this point of time (one or two manages to get through in a span of 3 days). Is there a way to stop them from visiting my site or am I doing something wrong to trigger them to visit my site?

p.s. shouldn't this thread be in the 'troubleshooting and problems' forum?