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I hope I have the right forum for this question...

Today I logged onto Google analytics and noticed that within a month, we grew from a 30% bounce rate from Russia up to 68%. We received nearly 500 views between two users, each view lasting a mere 12 seconds. Could this be a matter of foul play?

Both of the users own or atleast come from the IP of a software company that is speciaalized in lowering bounce rates/analytics/SEO. My collegue and I talked it out and we came up with 2 scenarios.

Scenario 1: It is a rival software company using some sort of VPN to flood our site, raise our bounce rate and move out Google rankings down. (If that is even possible).

Scenario 2: It is a software company flooding our site to raise our bounce rate, will call us and sell us a 'magical program' that once we purchase will surprisingly lower the amount of views from Russia.

Do any of these scenarios sound too far fetched? It is clearly a fake/dishonest user viewing, I just am unsure whether we can pin down who it is, or if Google will read it and realize that it is foul data? Also, we have HubSpot for our inbound marketing and they have not picked up on any of the bounces coming from this IP, were they able to weed them out as clearly fake?

Is there anything we can do to solve this? I am a front-end designer and do not know very much into analytics and things of this nature, thanks for your help!

Just a recap if unclear:

• Are my scenarios too far fetched/left field to be a possible reason?

• Is there anything we can do?

• Will Google Analytics eventually realize that this is not a real user?

• Are we going to lose Google ranking due to the MASSIVE bounce rate we built?

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I would like to clarify:

Google doesn't measure Bounce Rate for SERPs via Google Analytics, that is done from the actual SERP page using Javascript and Cookies etc.

It would actually be an anti-trust violation for them to use Google Analytics information as a rank factor.

It is most likely anonymous traffic and unless the traffic is finding your website via Google, visiting it, then immediately leaving it then it may impact your SERPs due to a manual manipulation.

it is far more likely that this anonymous traffic is visiting your website either as referral spam or scraping your website.

Having your website being scraped with bots is completely common and the only negative outcome from this scenario is that your data is being diluted - hindering your analysis.

The extreme solution would be to create a Filter in Google Analytics and to exclude data from this part off the world - but do this is a separate view in Google Analytics, so that you will always have the Raw Data to fall back on.

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  • Ah, I see, I just wasn't sure if it would be something look out for? As it was fine for quite a while and increasingly got worse and worse. Unfortunately, we deal with clients all over so excluding them would be a negative idea.
    – user53187
    Jun 11, 2015 at 14:43
  • This is why you create a new "View" in Google Analytics. Go to Admin > View > Dropdown Menu "Create a new view" This will give you a fresh Google Analytics view to play with, so you can add all your filters, site search settings etc in this one whilst keeping a Raw versions of your data available at all times. One thing you will definitely want to do is to set up valid hostnames - read halfway down this article: analyticsedge.com/2015/01/…
    – inkovic
    Jun 11, 2015 at 14:51

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