Strange traffic spike
We are taking https://smartforms.dev slowly, after the launch we put a big effort into backlink acquisition and tried to market the product, but later we realized that it was taking too much of our time and decided to just let it grow organically. After that our traffic dropped significantly, but the conversions grew. It makes sense I think, a person that find us organically generally wants to use the product.
We were having 5~8 new users every day, mainly from our backlinks and sometimes Google. But yesterday something really strange happened, we had 56 new users, and the strangest thing is that all the traffic is tagged as Direct.
A welcome surprise. I wonder if someone linked us somewhere or if it's from Google(I realized sometimes google traffic is tracked as Direct for some reason).
Has this happened to you guys? Would love to hear stories about random traffic spikes.
Happens all the time. Do you know what page people were landing on? If it's your homepage it might be difficult to figure out, but if it's some user-generated content page, then often people are just sharing links with each other.
"Direct" is really the most vague traffic source that Google Analytics gives you, as it not only includes direct visitors, but also sources that Google simply can't identify, e.g.
• offline docs like PDFs
• many mobile apps and sometimes mobile websites
• many email clients
• hilariously, even organic search sometimes
It's on the landing page, we have almost no content, only some pages explaining the product.
I can imagine that it happens a lot on sites like IH where users share content, It must feel good seeing all that traffic hahah. Thanks for the reply!
It might also be some bots. You should also check the visitor's behavior and locations/browsers to dismiss this option. Does the browser split, session length is comparable to the rest of the days of "direct" traffic?