Large Traffic Day Didn’t Show Up

Hi there,

Thanks for getting in touch about this.

I visited the page and I see the tracking script is firing successfully, so it should be capturing every visitor. In Google Analytics, can you check the source of the traffic and the session duration of these visitors? I am wondering if these were bot visits that may have visited the page and left very quickly before Independent Analytics could record the visit (it only fires after the page is fully loaded).

Another potential explanation could be if these visitors are logged into the site. Independent Analytics doesn’t track logged in visitors by default, but GA and Jetpack would.

Most of our vistors are not logged in.

According to Google – The session duration was only 3s – Does that indicate it was most likely Bot Traffic?

Thanks for letting me know.

If the average session duration is only 3 seconds, that does sound like many of the visits could have been from bots. I’d also recommend checking the referrers in GA if you can. If you isolate the data for just that one post and yesterday, you might find the traffic all came from the same place. If it’s bot traffic, it will probably be counted as “Direct” traffic or come from a strange URL.

I wish I had a more definitive answer, but I think that this is the most likely explanation.

The bulk of our referrers came from newsbreakapp.com. If a story performs well out of the gate they usually pick it up.

Hmm okay that doesn’t fit well with the bot hypothesis. In the Referrers menu in Independent Analytics, do you see traffic from newsbreakapp.com from on other days?

So it does show – but with less information that other analytics programs.

Here’s Independent – https://drive.google.com/file/d/1i7yeNmtDIBpGIlrEZ12_1SWeqULavsPb/view?usp=sharing

Here’s Jetpack – https://drive.google.com/file/d/1SpcF4KrX3vA3DdAfS_YePwv6lqyHRVAy/view?usp=sharing

Wow yea the News Break stats are dramatically different. Let me do some testing and see if there is some sort of conflict with the News Break app’s browser and IA.

Could you also check your geographic traffic for the spike? Does the traffic come from your area or is it all from another country?

Mostly US. Breakdowns here.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Xc3QxnO_GhGYYFWz0u_cnUpJy8P1sAIX/view?usp=sharing

https://drive.google.com/file/d/18p8o8Nox6hIPzeWPKIoStHD47Msd2ZmV/view?usp=drive_link

Thanks for your all your help with this. We will do some testing and I will get back to you with what we find.

Thank you so much! I really like this plugin and want it to grab our stats as accurately as possible. I appreciate the help here!