For the past week or so, Google Analytics has been showing inflated stats for several of my pages. A while back, I’d written about fake traffic in Google Analytics from visitors that weren’t coming to your site. I don’t know whether the perpetrators finally stopped or whether their tactics were blocked by Google. But the recent surge of fake Google Analytics hits are real visits – most likely from bots from countries like Czechia and Seychelles.
Classic Google Analytics Showing Bot Traffic
My site WP-Tweaks.com is pretty small, so it bears investigating when I get a traffic surge on a single day. Here’s a screenshot:
I can detect that this traffic is fake because the number of page views and the number of “unique pageviews” is exactly the same. Also, the bounce rate is 100%. With so many hits, I expect at least some visitors to click through a link or otherwise engage with the site. I’m also getting suspicious traffic from the Netherlands in this screenshot.
I’m certain this traffic exists, as opposed to simply “fake” traffic like the last time, because it has a source and shows that it’s coming from Google. So some script is clicking on Google search results, visiting the site, triggering the GA code, and leaving immediately.
Based on the metrics, here’s my estimate of the traffic I received on the 14th of August after filtering out traffic from Czechia, Seychelles, and the Netherlands.
Total traffic for the 14th of August = 596
Likely fake traffic = 226+156+28 = 410
Likely real traffic = 186
Better Measurement Tools: Cloudflare Analytics and GA4
Since we’re going to be migrating away to Google Analytics 4 in any case, I thought I’d see whether other reporting tools were showing similar issues.
Tracking the Hits on GA4
Here’s a screenshot showing the number of hits detected by GA4:
As you can see, GA4 doesn’t count the traffic from Czechia and Seychelles, which means they’re likely bots that classic Google Analytics isn’t filtering. The reported traffic of 163 is much closer to my estimate of real traffic.
Tracking the Hits on Cloudflare Web Analytics
Another tool I use for measuring traffic is Cloudflare’s Web Analytics, which is focused on privacy and has a sleeker interface. Here’s a screenshot of the traffic analytics on WP-Tweaks.com from Cloudflare:
This number is even closer to my estimate of likely real traffic than GA4. I don’t know how Cloudflare and Google Analytics differ in measurement, but there’s some divergence. For now, I prefer Cloudflare’s metrics – particularly since GA4 inexplicably delays data reporting for hours. GA4 appears to be more strict in its interpretation of visits than Cloudflare Web Analytics.
Time to Abandon Google Analytics
All this points to a disturbing truth – like it or not, it’s time to start moving away from classic Google Analytics. Official support ends on the 23rd of July, 2023, but we should be moving away sooner, if possible. Unfortunately, while very good, Cloudflare’s Analytics solution doesn’t provide metrics like event measurement for clicks that I need to analyze my site usage. Microsoft Clarity is another good tool that doesn’t report statistics in a neat tabular format like Google Analytics.
GA4 is, unfortunately, still the best choice despite glaring problems with reporting delays that make it an inferior product as of now. Hopefully, the existing solutions will improve to match GA’s feature set before Google finally retires it.
I’m a NameHero team member, and an expert on WordPress and web hosting. I’ve been in this industry since 2008. I’ve also developed apps on Android and have written extensive tutorials on managing Linux servers. You can contact me on my website WP-Tweaks.com!
We’ve had the same exact issue this week and last week and did the same thing with our statistics, removed all the “visitors” from those countries! Super weird. Obviously bots.
With thousands of websites impacted by this fake traffic from Czechia and the Seychelles, do you think Google will try to fix this? Or do you think they’ll be like “F it, at least people will understand now they need to migrate to GA4!” It’s been two weeks already, they’re usually very responsive.
The latter. F it.
Hello, im having same problem on my website, How to solve this? I hate this situations…
Same problem from my side!!! How is possible…i can’t count real visitors!!!
I had the exact same issues with fake organic traffic initially they were from Czechia and Seychelles but now in the past few days the same appears from the Netherlands. It had to keep block / filtering out the traffic from these countries. Tough for a global domain to keep filtering out such traffic. It’s weird that Google hasn’t acted as yet!
I saw this issue when I found the bounce rate on my site suddenly went very high this month. I filtered the traffic out with Cloudflare as I’ve had mixed results doing it on Google Analytics.
Thanks for posting this. I noticed this a week ago from the same two countries but didn’t dig that deep into it. I’m used to direct garbage traffic but don’t understand the purpose of these bots going through the organic channel.
I experienced similiar problem on one of the clients sites, with a lot of spam traffic. Did You found any potential patterns, IDs or IP ranges? (on Cloudflare analytics or due to log analysis from Your own server?).
Hi Bhagwad
Thanks for this article ! We are not alone 😍
We have exactly the same issue here. We’ve tried to block them off higher up, ie on the web server. But it seems some of these bots are not even hitting the site, but are just hitting the GA javascript directly.
We have decided to migrate our analytics over to Matomo, and we will concurrently set up GA4 (“we might as well”) to see what difference that makes.
We’re a small site like you soit’s basicallyy impossible to analyse anything.
And as you say : “F it !!!!”
Paul
The same store here. But it seems that I have a clue about the reason of this fake traffic. GA sees it as google search traffic. Unfortunately search keyword in GA are displayed as “not provided”. As far as I know when you search and click in Google it keeps tracking your website using GA, so if you have bad bounce rate or time on site, your positions start to fade out. Google change positions if it sees that your content isn’t interesting. GA provides that info.
Probably the reason of that is that an attacker want to decrease your search positions. It looks to be true in my case.