Everyone! Check your traffic!
Google Analytics hasn’t yet blocked Amazon’s AWS bots. I’ve been running through client accounts lately and it appears not a lot of people have caught this traffic source as fake. It’s been inflating a lot of reports without anyone knowing and it’s been active for a few years. The traffic comes in spikes as seen above which can really throw off the measurement of digital marketing campaigns.
Here’s where to find it, in Google Analytics:
Audience > Technology > Network
In the US, what you’re most likely to see is a few normal internet service providers such as:
- time warner cable internet llc
- mci communications services inc. d/b/a verizon business
In Canada you’ll find ISPs such as:
- shaw communications inc.
telus communications inc.
And then you’ll find the culprits!
- amazon technologies inc.
amazon.com inc.
If you look at the Session Duration, Bounce Rate and % of New Sessions you’ll begin to see something very suspicious. All of those really bad numbers such as 99.9% Bounce Rate indicate that these are bots.
Why Google hasn’t caught this yet is beyond me. Usually if there’s a well known bot Google will be able to filter it via your Settings as seen below.
The problem is that even in you have this checked, the Amazon bot traffic is getting through as of now.
Some are saying it’s traffic from Pingdom, and some are saying it’s from Hubspot. The reality is that Ashburn is home to Amazon’s AWS servers which a ton of web services run off of. There’s no one service at fault, it’s the server.
The Fix, as seen here:
- Go to Admin
- Select your View
- Click “Filters”
- Add a filter to exclude traffic from Ashburn
This seems like the easiest method right now as the city has a population of 43,000 people. Let’s hope Google catches this one!
