Google Analytics shows strange Campaign traffic?

[elster]

I'm looking at traffic in GA for this site that has been up for several years.

Beginning in Dec this year, starting after the first week there is a new traffic source showing and its significant. It is labelled by GA as source/medium: rss / rss. Again, no visits prior to the data in GA. At first I thought this might be a spike from being indexed in Google News but not sure since the traffic occurred and spiked also on days when there was new content but not in Google News. Typically this being a news site traffic spikes as posts are published. New posts get the majority of traffic.

However for example for traffic from the other day, there were no new posts and I got the most traffic from a post from over one month old which does not make sense. It shows average time on page as 19 seconds and with a bounce rate of 8.83%? Also strange is this traffic seems to be also tagged as a campaign, but when I look at the campaign name it shows as the article/post title? Maybe somehow somewhere people got mislead into thinking this was a new post and they bounced when they realized it was not?

Anyone have any idea what is happening? Are these bots? Is this bad? Certainly is misleading traffic figures.

[Clinton]

Is there possibly an error in how your goals are setup?

[elster]

Good thought but I have no goals setup. Could it be a Wordpress plugin of some kind?

I should note that all the content under the source rss/rss is marked as campaigns with each campaign having the title of the post....

[crabfoot]

Check the PR of that page. Since Panda, most domains drop without good PR, although a lot still have traffic. Then again, this all started before Panda.

Whatever, it sounds like someone has pointed a domain at the page, and is trying to use that as a way to get PR on their domain before using it or selling it.

[elster]

This is for several posts, not just an isolated incident. There are about 50 posts this is happening for - all appearing as campaign. Again prior to the one date in Dec, there were zero campaigns at all in my analytics for years.

BTW, I should mention this is for my site, not one I am buying but I thought you guys would be sharp with looking at this.

I checked a few pages with SEOQuake in Chrome and it looks like most of them are zero if that plugin is to be believed? I think that makes sense since these are recent posted articles.

[elster]

I thought it might have something to do with this plugin, http://yoast.com/wordpress/google-analytics/, which says somewhere that it can convert clicks into pageviews or something like that, which might show more traffic but I am not sure how/why it would relabel rss and campaign sources. A conflict or bug? I messaged the dev and disabled the plugin but still seems to be showing me these kind of campaigns in Analytics.

I also thought maybe this is a result of Google News syndicating these articles somewhere? If I go into Google News and search or click thru to a story in Google News it does not show this behavior but maybe if there are sites somewhere using Google News feeds? I am trying to think of a way to test this using the Google Analytics real-time feature.

[tke71709]

Seeing as this is your personal site Elster what I would recommend is that you let it be known that you are willing to grant access to the Analytics account if anyone wants to take a look at what is happening.

This is one of those conversations where descriptions of what is happening is not as useful as actual access to the stats themselves.

Of course, you should restrict access to members whom you trust.

[elster]

I think so for the right person! Hopefully it would be useful to know what it is going on. Here is a screenshot of the campaigns where you can see they begin in early Dec.... the titles of the campaigns match the post titles. I erased stuff that was sensitive obviously from the screenshot.

http://postimage.org/image/48ou0ikar/

Here is a second screenshot showing the RSS / Campaigns relationship. Again all the campaign titles are post titles. http://s5.postimage.org/sqlj25c93/analytics1.png

[elster]

OK, think I found a major, if not THE major culprit. Looks like some of the site's referring sites have bad URLs linking to the posts w/ these campaign callouts. So it is showing up in Analytics but goto the URL and there is nothing there.

Does anyone have any *smart* plugins for Wordpress that fix broken links? Don't know if such a thing exists but I have about 10k according to Google Webmaster Tools. Not sure if this is from permalinks change or what....

BTW - discovered this looking in Google Webmaster Tools and looking at broken links....

[KenW3]

For WordPress and broken links, take a look at the DigiLinkDoctor.com plugin. If you decide to buy a copy, there is a special offer page that is promoted occasionally at digilinkdoctor.com/specialoffer.html that provides a substantial discount.