recently i'm experiencing that GA is showing a ton of 'google.com / referral' traffic on 2 separate websites that i manage. Before this amount was near to zero. Both sites started to produce this anomaly just in a few days difference. That's why i think, maybe i modified some setting for both pages, but i can't figure out, yet what. Update 2019/03/25 now i'm sure it's connected to Google Ads config! But still no exact finding of what in there. Auto-tagging? Conversion linker tag in GTM? etc..?
see with your eyes:
referral path: seems to be google search engine's uri
city: (not set) Why?
pages/session: seems diverse/normal (not bot?)
session duration: nearly 0 (redirect?)
multiple hits spiking randomly throughout the day (started on 11 Mar)
5-10 hits at a (same) time!
The referral path shows (/search, /m/search) that these hits are coming from the Google search engine URI, is that right? And why the city is (not set)? They seem to be human hits because of the varying pages/session. BUT the session duration is mostly 0. That can feel like redirects. But then where/how?
more info:
No active 301 redirects set in .htaccess (as another Question dealt with it). I double checked it at both sites.
i checked in my Google Ads report, the 'google / cpc' data is right and in par between GA and G ads reporting
Both are Wordpress websites, with Yoast SEO + Really Simple SSL plugins active (and many more).
Both websites having active Google Ads campaigns + linked to Google Analytics.
Both are non ecommerce sites, just simple wp sites.
GA property or view settings or Google Ads settings maybe cause it? Advertising Reporting Features is turned on at both sites now. Can it be the reason? Any ideas? Thanks!
Update 2019/03/25 now i'm sure it's connected to Google Ads config! But still no exact finding of what in there. Auto-tagging? Conversion linker tag in GTM? etc..?
