Hit 2,000 Users and Discovered 35% of My Traffic Was Fake

I recently crossed 2,000 active users on a small side project and was feeling pretty good about the growth.

Then I started digging deeper into the analytics.

At first glance, traffic looked great. More visitors, more page views, and steady growth week after week. But something felt off. Engagement was low, session durations were strange, and conversions weren't matching the traffic numbers.

After reviewing the data more carefully, I realized a significant portion of the traffic wasn't coming from real users at all. A lot of it was bot traffic, scrapers, and automated requests that were inflating my metrics.

The biggest lesson for me was that traffic numbers alone don't tell the full story. Looking at bounce rates, session duration, conversion rates, and traffic sources gave me a much clearer picture of what was actually happening.

I've since started filtering suspicious traffic patterns and my analytics make a lot more sense now.

Curious if anyone else has run into the same issue. How do you identify and deal with bot traffic in your analytics stack? Any tools or techniques you've found useful?

This turned out to be one of the most valuable lessons I've learned while building online products.