Weird Google Analytics

[Jason Hansman]

Hey everyone,

I was looking at my Google Analytics this week and as of Wednesday they went absolutely crazy.  My social network averages between 150 - 200 visitors a day; now I'm getting statistics that there are close to a thousand a day visiting - we peaked at 1,500 on Friday.  This seems suspect at best as my community only has a little over 5k.

What's even more interesting is that my pageviews has stayed constant (1,500 - 2,500):

And my bounce rate has skyrocketed from 25%-35% to 80%:

Has anyone else had this problem?  Or even know what's going on?

Thanks!

Jason

[John]

I've gotten a pop in visitors since Wednesday too.
What's confusing is that the search engine counts haven't increased.

Maybe Google is reporting visitors more accurately now.
http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=goo...

[Lora]

I am having issues as well........ here is my thread

http://creators.ning.com/forum/topics/google-analytics-help?xg_sour...

[Jason Hansman]

I'd love to think that it's because Google Analytics is getting better. Strangely though I haven't seen any news on this, and the Analytics blog seems quiet - especially if they made a major change - which is what I'm seeing. Guess I'll accept the numbers and pat myself on the back for being so awesome.

[Kris]

since your bounce rate has skyrocketed it sounds like bots or spammers

[Lora]

I was wondering about this myself. Yet no one has reported any issues and my members are quick to tell me if they got spammed.

[Jason Hansman]

I was thinking this too. However, we are a closed network and the only page that bots or spammers can get to (our pending approval page) hasn't seen any significant increase in traffic.

[Phil McCluskey]

Hi Jason,

The increased bounce rate means that these new visitors are only visiting one page of your network rather than 2 or more. Since your network is private, I suspect you're getting a lot of visitors who hit the authentication page and then leave. Google Analytics should be able to tell you the source of the traffic though, which should give you some clues about what's happening.

[Andrew Krzmarzick]

It definitely sounds like your cookies are being overwritten on every page by conflicting scripts that each use the same cookies. If so, every page that has this problem would record a 'new' visit because the cookies think you just showed up to the site for the first time. This would also cause each 'new' visit to result in a bounce because, again, the cookies were overwritten and thus GA thinks you exited each time. This would explain your dramatically increased visit count and bounce rate, even though the page views stayed consistent with before - each erroneous new visit would also be recorded as 'direct', because the information on the true source (search, referral, etc) was overwritten.

We experienced a different problem (insanely large time on page metrics) with the GA on my Ning social network, and it started on the exact same day (Wednesday the 9th). We found that Ning is now using their own Google Analytics code on our pages to track to their accounts, and they are using the Asynchronous GA code - something that we don't think they were doing before.

We have been using the Traditional GA code, and Google documentation strongly suggests not to use both the Asynchronous code and the Traditional GA code on the same page, "because this can produce inaccurate report data". I'm thinking this could be the cause of our problems, and potentially yours as well. http://www.google.to/support/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&am...

We have updated our code to the Asynchronous version in hopes that this will fix our problems. Hopefully that would work for you too.

[John]

Thanks for the announcement Andrew. I see the second Google Analytics in my source too.

[Lora]

So Andrew... then my 58% increase in direct traffic is because Ning's GA tracking is being seen by MY GA TWICE ????? :)

[Radialistas Brasileiros]

This explanation simple doesn´t make sense since my delivered adsense blocks just grewed up in the same proportion than my analytics stats, so I delivering more ad blocks because I showing more pages!

The question is: how so many new visitors have suddenly start to visit my site and coming from so diferent sources, in my case from all over Brasil!

At the momment my stats starts to grow I was making hevy efforts of engagement with my members, so I feel surprised but I didn´t have this perception of something strange was happening that we have now.

I just happen with my NING site (for shure the one I´ve been working had to make happen) I expected it happens but no with so many new visits from so many different cities from Brasil with this so big bounce rate and staying so little time, I have more 5 sites in my analytics account and all behave the same as expected.

I don´t know what´s going on but GA tracking I know is not!

[MAXX]

In the past week, I have seen a spike in traffic--more than double our usual amount of traffic. The odd thing about this traffic:

It is direct traffic. Usually search engine traffic is our leading type of traffic
This traffic is on the site for a short amount of time as evidenced by the decrease in avg time on site
The bounce rate has gone from about 35% to 80%
There has been no significant increase in invites

Is this some type of spam attack or what? Here is an overview of the analytics: