Are those sudden huge visits to your website from Russia or US? We did some analysis on spammers.
If you have noticed some strange referrals (best-seo-solution, get-free-traffic,...) in your website analytics, you are among lucky. You have noticed it and that makes you smart enough to do something about it. There are others who just take their analytics as granted.
Is that an issue?
Well most certainly you know, but your whole view of website analytics may be wrong if you do not exclude that data from analysis. These may not be real people visiting your website, but robots. So your pageviews and bounce rate statistics may be all wrong.
Did you notice bolded may be? That's because there are several ways somebody can add referer to your analytics data.
What's analytics spammers intention?
Mostly to take money for their work. Survive like you do. But they get money from those who belive in huge website traffic for 9,99$. Or body parts enlargments for 9,99$.
Where are analytics spammers from?
After analysing the issue on our website 1 we thought they most come from Russia as they were leading with some 86% of SPAM visits.
Then we have analysed website 2 and it turns that it was more interesting for spammers from US which represented majority with 47% of SPAM visits.
Of course, that's not their real location. It's most probably IP of the hacked computer. Or something. Who cares, but it's kind of cool to look at the data by location. :)
The humaniod bots
Seems like they like to pretend to be new visitors mostly. Which is kind of obvious since they are selling you new traffic. Except the iloveitaly.com which had one loyal returning visitor in our data. :)
Exclude that one and their session are mostly about few pages and a minute long.
Bounce rate? 100%. But not always. Domain event-tracking.com and erot.co have a bounce rate of 0% (image below).
All together, simmilar to average user except the bounce rates which seem to be random 0% or 100%. For now.
How bots came to our website
That's the differentiating point.
They use referral always. Because that's what they tend to sell.
Just look at the referrer tag cloud in the image and you'll get a feeling of how they are different from normal.
No landing pages?
As for now it seems that spammers are not using any particular landing page, thus landing on the top domain level most of the times. But not all of the times. Sometimes they return and land on a subpage.
Campaign
Some of them include campaign characteristics. Strangely there seems to be a difference among spammers. The guys behind event tracking domain make sure that you notice their good value for low bounce rate of the new visitors.
Using events tracking
That's the feature where you will most probably notice these smart guys first if you use events tracking in your analytics. A category will apear in your results: to use this feature visit: EVENT-TRACKING.COM. And it may cause many hits to your website to ruin your analytics.
What can you do about all this?
Depends on how spammers do it. Hopefully not by a botnet with virus browser plugins.