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I had a traffic spike on my site between 25th and 27th October 2021.

I received an email today from Google Search Console Team to confirm:

Here is how some of your top queries performed in the week of 25-Oct-2021 to 31-Oct-2021:

  • Query: example.com username generator
    • #1 query on your site
    • 152,801 impressions
    • 28.99% of total site impressions, more than the 0.27% it got in the previous weeks.

This is a screenshot showing the spike:

This is a screenshot showing the spike

This is a view of Acquisition > All Traffic > Source/Medium for 21st Oct to 1st Nov, but it doesn't provide much info:

Acquisition > All Traffic > Source/Medium for 21st Oct to 1st Nov

Maybe that's as much as I can find out - it's strange though - seems for a few days, peaking on 26th Oct, lots of people searched for example.com username generator but I can't see what would have triggered it - is there any way I can find out?

I did search on google for example.com username generator -example.com to find sites mentioning my site, but where the link isn't coming from my site, and it did return results, but I was not able to find anything relevant.

Any advice much appreciated.

Thanks

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  • Can you provide an additional screenshots from the 24th-present, and then just on the 26th?
    – Mike Ciffone
    Nov 2, 2021 at 23:45

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A few possibilities come to mind, but there's one that stands out.

You've Got Two Analytics Tags Firing At Once

Your bounce rate is peculiar. Any time I see a bounce rate less than 30% I check for this. In my experience (~7 years, 5 professionally) this is almost always the cause of oddly low bounce rates.

It could just be the nature of this query/SERP - I imagine #1 spot for a "user name generator" is pretty low. You've got a lot of loyalists that trust your app. I'm this way with a certain image conversion tool....also a compression one. 12.95% though is ridiculously low.

Why Would Two GA Tags Firing at Once Obliterate Your Bounce Rate?

A bounce is a single-page session when the user doesn’t click on anything. They read and leave.

When two GA tracking snippets that are installed on the same site fire simultaneously they mistake one another as “actions". So for each session, on all pages that two analytics scripts execute, the bounce rate will be counted as 0%. If your installation of the code is the universal method (via document <head>) this is happening on each page.

If this is not the case, we'd need more data to truly understand what's going on.

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