How To Know If You’ve Been Traffic-Spammed

If you are like us at PowerToFly, always keeping a close eye on what happens in Google Analytics and especially monitoring your referrals, you might have noticed a sudden surge of traffic coming from…Reddit.

I actually complimented our Social Editor saying that we seem to be doing great job on Reddit, a lot of traffic came our way, which has never happened before! She returned a surprised Slack message which pretty much meant “WTF? No campaigns on Reddit!”

Then I started digging deeper and encountered it was yet another traffic spam. So, if you experienced similar symptoms or blank stares from your Marketing team, read along, it might help your investigation!

Symptom 1: From zero to hero and back to zero in no time!

Sudden, inexplicable surge of traffic from an unexpected source. In our case, starting on November 30th and ending 2 days later. 99.9% of the traffic were new users.

Symptom 2: Non-Converting Traffic!

We all experience badly converting campaigns from time to time. But when you get over 1,000 new site visitors and not a single one completed a goal, then either half of your site is broken, your product just won “Scam of the Year Award”, or this is spam traffic!

In our case bounce rates did not go up because more than 1 page was viewed per session. Also session time was over a minute so it does not fit most scam filters you might have set.

Symptom 3: They Love Me Da, They Love Me Nyet

Looking at the country origin (or language) of the Reddit traffic, we became an overnight internet sensation in Russia! While we do get legitimate traffic from Russia, those people behave in a different way and submit forms or register. 99.6% of this Reddit traffic came from Russia — definitely fishy!

Symptom 4: Check Once, Check Twice, Check Thrice

Make sure you check the full referrer info for the source in question. Then search info online, update your antivirus and go to that link in private browser mode. Don’t download anything if you are prompted to. Don’t click further links on this page, just as a precaution.

It is important to check the links because in our case, three out of the five links were legitimate forum discussions where our site is mentioned. Only the first link is problematic for sure, the second is potentially so.

What to do?

Now that you have investigated and found scammy traffic on your site, you want to remove it from reports.

Depending on the nature of your business, you might decide to filter traffic from this country or language, for example. It cannot be done in our case because, as I said, we do get legitimate users from each country around the world.

You can filter Reddit traffic as another option, which we also cannot do in our case, because there are legitimate forum discussions there bringing us word-of-mouth traffic that we want to be aware of.

So, we would be filtering out only the first two links discussed above and would continue monitoring daily for the next scammers who try (and fail!) to outsmart us.

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