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1 to 4 visitors seems to be visiting my site and then returning every few minutes. They are fake (seem like robots). I'm not sure how to get rid of them or filter them out because they are not coming from Referral. In fact, they are Direct visitors.

I'm just not sure why robots would want to visit my home page every few minutes. I've been having this issue for months now and I want to stop it because it's affecting my stats. Any tips please?

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  • Most robots that inflate your GA stats never actually visit your site at all, they only ping the GA tracker. Can you look to at a report that show hostname for this traffic? Is this traffic showing the domain name of your site? Often robots don't even include the correct host name when they behave this way. Commented Jul 19, 2020 at 11:15
  • Where can I find the report which shows host name? No domain name as far as I can see.
    – Marco V
    Commented Jul 19, 2020 at 12:50
  • You can create a custom report to view by hostname. See webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/130344/… It would probably be useful to apply a segment to that report to only look at the home page so that you can see just home page traffic by host name. Commented Jul 19, 2020 at 13:22

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As @StephenOstermiller points out, this is likely spam traffic which doesn't ever come anywhere near your website. People are simply sending data to Analytics using your tracking ID. The idea is that you become interested in what this traffic is and look at the referrer or hostname of it. Google has been doing better at blocking some of this traffic over the last few years, but they're careful to not block traffic that might actually be genuine so some still gets through.

Easiest way to see if this is the case: Go to Behaviour > Site Content > All Pages, click your home page (probably indicated by /) and then add Hostname as a secondary dimension. If one of the hostnames shown isn't your website's then it's junk and not actually traffic to your website.

You can block this junk traffic at View level by adding a hostname filter. Here's Google's own instructions on filters at view level:
https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1033162?hl=en

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  • I've tried what you recommended in GA but the only host name I see is my own site URL. It's just a single visitor, use to be more but I've managed to find and block those through their IP. This one doesn't even have an IP.
    – Marco V
    Commented Jul 19, 2020 at 18:26

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