Why Do I Have So Much Website Traffic From Ashburn?

If you are using Google Analytics to analyze your website traffic, you may have noticed an increase in your overall website traffic these last few months. While that is great, you may have been scratching your head as to why the new influx in traffic comes with a much higher bounce rate, a reduced time on site, and an extremely high drop-off on your home page.

Don’t worry; you were not the only one who was totally confused by the outcomes of these reports. KWSM: a digital marketing agency has numerous clients who rely on us for their website reporting, and we noticed this problem across the board.

The Cause: Amazon AWS Bots

After doing a deep dive and researching the root of the problem we found that most of the traffic from Ashburn is fake. Amazon’s AWS bots (and Hubspot) are visiting your website but leave without a trace. This is a problem because it is inflating your total sessions without contributing to the Google Analytics metrics your care about. Depending on how much website traffic you get, this could be inflating your reports by more than 50%, which can really throw off the measurement of digital marketing campaigns.

What You Can Do About This Fake Traffic

There is really nothing you can do to prevent this from happening. Usually, Google Analytics is fairly good at blocking and filtering out this type of website traffic, but it has dropped the ball for some time. We recommend double-checking that your settings are set to exclude bots and that you are filtering out bad traffic from Ashburn.

1. Double Check Your Settings are Excluding Bots

why-do-i-have-so-much-website-traffic-from-ashburn-kwsm-blog

Go to your Admin page (located in the bottom right), under the third column called ‘View’ look for the tab that says ‘View Settings.’ When you click into that, you should see a section called “Bot Filtering.” Make sure that the box is checked to “Exclude all hits from known bots and spiders.”

2. Set Up a Filter to Exclude Fake Trafficwhy-do-i-have-so-much-website-traffic-from-ashburn-kwsm-blog

To set up a filter go back to the column called ‘View’ but this time click on the ‘Filters’ tab. Once you click on “Add Filter” you should be able to follow this screenshot set up to add the filter to exclude traffic from Ashburn, specific IP addresses, or other spam sources.

If you need help, please don’t hesitate to contact us.

Less than 60 percent of web traffic is human.

It is crucial for business owners to understand the website on their behavior to help make important business decisions. Our team of web experts will ensure that you are making your decisions on real data and will be able to help you make better, more informed decisions.

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Follow Layla Lameijer:
Layla is an experienced digital marketer and a Content Editor at KWSM. She has worked on marketing strategies for startups, small businesses and established corporations in a variety of industries.

25 Responses

  1. Viraj Suryawanshi
    | Reply

    Thanks, Layla for the solution you provided, a really helpful article for my website.

    • Layla Lameijer
      | Reply

      My pleasure!

  2. CPK
    | Reply

    Great article – so helpful! Easy instructions, too. Thank you.

    • Layla Lameijer
      | Reply

      You’re welcome! Glad you were able to figure it out.

  3. Layla Lameijer
    | Reply

    Glad I could help!

  4. wad kniss
    | Reply

    in the case we let things like they are, is it a problem for google to receive fake traffic? Will it negatively impact my website traffic?

    • Layla Lameijer
      | Reply

      No, there is no negative impact if you leave things as they are. It simply filters the sessions from your reporting.

  5. Claudia
    | Reply

    Many thanks for this very helpful article! We had just wondered why our german blog suddenly had so many readers from Ashburn / Virgina.

    • Layla Lameijer
      | Reply

      Great to hear we were able to help!

  6. Sumit
    | Reply

    thanks for the information….

    • Layla Lameijer
      | Reply

      Hi Sumit! You are welcome, glad it was helpful to you.

  7. Tushar
    | Reply

    This helped us preventing traffic from Ashburn, Thanks a lot!

    • Layla Lameijer
      | Reply

      Hi Tushar, no problem! Glad we could help.

  8. Aktüel Bilgiler
    | Reply

    Our website received a lot of visitors through Ashburn and the bounce rate was dropping drastically. This article eliminated a big problem for me. Thank you.

    • Layla Lameijer
      | Reply

      Glad we could help!

  9. Mike K.
    | Reply

    Has anyone encountered this same issue (Ashburn, VA traffic) as it relates to Goal Completions? All of our goals are being attributed to Ashburn and the traffic source is always Direct.

    • Layla Lameijer
      | Reply

      We have not encountered this. This might be a quick fix if you have a human captcha to your form fills!

  10. Mike K.
    | Reply

    The bounce rates, pages per session and time on page are all zero values. I do know the form completions are legitimate (real people). So confused.

    • Layla Lameijer
      | Reply

      Per my last comment, consider adding a captcha to avoid bots from filling out your forms. If you have access to the form submissions, you may be able to find out if these are legitimate.

  11. Angela
    | Reply

    Hello Layla, thank you so much for your help. I was wondering, I am gonna do both the filter and the excluding bots thing, so I am going to clear my analytics from this visits. But my main worry is this.. is it going to continue affecting the SEO of my web? I am very concerned because all of this Ashborn visits are producing a 100% bounce rate in my site. I am not sure if changing this is it going to solve the problem or hide the problem.

    Thank you so much for your post!!

    • Layla Lameijer
      | Reply

      Of course, Angela! Glad to help. This solution will mainly hide the problem. The short answer to your concern is that, no your SEO will not be impacted by your bot traffic if it makes up a small percentage of your total traffic. Since SEO is a complex topic, the longer answer does show that in some ways the bad bots that hit your site can negatively impact your SERP. If you would like to have a full discussion, please contact us.

  12. Jojn Roger
    | Reply

    Hi,
    Thanks for the write up. It cleared few issues, Although some doubts remain.

    How can we know that traffic from Ashburn is NOT spam, and Real. Even “Network domain’ is now (not set)

    Thanks

    • Layla Lameijer
      | Reply

      Hi Jojn, unfortunately the nature of this spam is that it is not tracked. A good indication of spam traffic is the session duration being 0:00 and the pages/session being 1.0. If you need help analyzing your Google Analytics, please contact us.

  13. Jani
    | Reply

    thank you, I appreciate the write up – our moving company in vancouver bc serves only canadian customers, so it was a surprise to see this city come up as number 3 on the list of cities in our google analytics.

    • Layla Lameijer
      | Reply

      Hi Jani, glad we could help!

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