Post by account_disabled on Nov 23, 2023 4:18:37 GMT -5
A sad story full of broken hopes and unfulfilled goals, right? But a story that brought valuable lessons to the entire team — and that I want to share with you now.
In this post, you’ll learn how our investigation went and what to do when your site receives fake traffic.
How did Czechia and Seychelles come into our lives?
It all started on August 4th, when the C Level Executive Email Lists traffic on our US blog (which remained constant throughout June) grew 37% from one day to the next.
On the 8th of August, we were already getting almost twice as much traffic compared to a day in June.
The first thing I did was identify the source of this traffic in the Acquisition Reporting section of Google Analytics. Maybe it was a spike in paid traffic coming from some campaign. Maybe we went viral on social media, who knows?
But no, it was actually a spike in organic traffic. This already struck me as odd, because Rock Content‘s blog traffic has never behaved this way.
I put “Country” as a secondary filter on Analytics. And this was the result:
The United States left first place as the country that most accesses our blog, losing its crown to two countries that had never appeared in our rankings.
The strangest thing was Seychelles, an archipelago in Africa with a population of less than 95,000 people that, ten years ago, had less than 2,000 internet users, according to Wikipedia. If you like cartoons, it’s near Madagascar.
This intrigued us: how does a small archipelago that has tourism and fishing and its primary economic activities become so interested in Digital Marketing all of a sudden?
The investigation continues…
Once I knew where the traffic was coming from, I needed to understand why.
In this post, you’ll learn how our investigation went and what to do when your site receives fake traffic.
How did Czechia and Seychelles come into our lives?
It all started on August 4th, when the C Level Executive Email Lists traffic on our US blog (which remained constant throughout June) grew 37% from one day to the next.
On the 8th of August, we were already getting almost twice as much traffic compared to a day in June.
The first thing I did was identify the source of this traffic in the Acquisition Reporting section of Google Analytics. Maybe it was a spike in paid traffic coming from some campaign. Maybe we went viral on social media, who knows?
But no, it was actually a spike in organic traffic. This already struck me as odd, because Rock Content‘s blog traffic has never behaved this way.
I put “Country” as a secondary filter on Analytics. And this was the result:
The United States left first place as the country that most accesses our blog, losing its crown to two countries that had never appeared in our rankings.
The strangest thing was Seychelles, an archipelago in Africa with a population of less than 95,000 people that, ten years ago, had less than 2,000 internet users, according to Wikipedia. If you like cartoons, it’s near Madagascar.
This intrigued us: how does a small archipelago that has tourism and fishing and its primary economic activities become so interested in Digital Marketing all of a sudden?
The investigation continues…
Once I knew where the traffic was coming from, I needed to understand why.