Digital marketing
Strange spikes or 'bot' traffic in your website stats
It's normal for websites to be visited by bots every day: search engines, AI tools, price checkers and spammers. They can cause sudden spikes in your visitor numbers.
Why your stats differ between tools
- Google Analytics (GA4) automatically excludes known bots and spiders. You can't turn this off or see how many were removed.
- Shopify analytics and hosting stats may count traffic that GA4 filters out, so numbers won't match exactly.
Can we block it?
Some, but not all. We can block obvious bad bots at the firewall on sites we host. On hosted platforms like Shopify, there's very little control over who visits the store itself. Blocking too hard can also stop Google from indexing your site.
What we usually do
- Report on GA4 numbers, which are cleaner for decisions.
- Use filters or comparisons in reports to set aside unusual traffic sources or countries.
- Look at sales, enquiries and conversions, not just visits.
Seeing a sudden spike? Raise a ticket with the dates and a screenshot of the report.