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Boardman, OR Direct traffic.....From Amazon???

John V.

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Jan 15, 2015
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So I noticed a spike in my Direct Traffic in my GA account this month and did some digging. I first searched by User>>City to see where it was located and the #1 referral was coming from Boardman, Oregon. I'm on the east coast so that seemed strange. Using the Service Provider as a secondary dimension, turns out its all coming through "amazon technologies inc."

This is happening on all four of my websites. Assuming this is some sort of BOT scraping my website but why? Something doesn't smell right. Anyone else getting hit with this? It's a little over 1,000 sessions.

No, I am not using a sketchy 3rd party for anything. I did just switch website providers who host my sites using AWS - would that have any affect?
 
So I noticed a spike in my Direct Traffic in my GA account this month and did some digging. I first searched by User>>City to see where it was located and the #1 referral was coming from Boardman, Oregon. I'm on the east coast so that seemed strange. Using the Service Provider as a secondary dimension, turns out its all coming through "amazon technologies inc."

This is happening on all four of my websites. Assuming this is some sort of BOT scraping my website but why? Something doesn't smell right. Anyone else getting hit with this? It's a little over 1,000 sessions.

No, I am not using a sketchy 3rd party for anything. I did just switch website providers who host my sites using AWS - would that have any affect?
It very well could be a bot (probably is) and is derived from a malicious 3rd party utilizing their technology offering. Sorry, maybe I am overstating the obvious man. Unless they are serving your site from one of their beacons / centers and it's picking up weird traffic from the source...?
 
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So I noticed a spike in my Direct Traffic in my GA account this month and did some digging. I first searched by User>>City to see where it was located and the #1 referral was coming from Boardman, Oregon. I'm on the east coast so that seemed strange. Using the Service Provider as a secondary dimension, turns out its all coming through "amazon technologies inc."

This is happening on all four of my websites. Assuming this is some sort of BOT scraping my website but why? Something doesn't smell right. Anyone else getting hit with this? It's a little over 1,000 sessions.

No, I am not using a sketchy 3rd party for anything. I did just switch website providers who host my sites using AWS - would that have any affect?
Amazon has a data center in Boardman, OR. I think @brianpasch tracked some email campaign stuff back to Amazon some time ago ( a year or two, anyway). Maybe he can help.
 
It's bot/spam traffic from the big Amazon server farm out there in the middle of nowhere. (Only about 3,000 human residents.) I suggest filtering for this traffic in your primary GA view. You can always create another unfiltered view to spot check from time to time. Also make sure you've got known bot filtering on in GA.
 
Thanks guys. Definitely not through a 3rd party email company. I did even more research last night and it turns out this issue is not relegated to just my site or even automotive but its happening across the world and on all different verticals. What a pain in the a##......
 
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It is a bot/spam from an Amazon server farm in Boardman, OR. It's pretty common among all websites, not just automotive.

It's a small annoyance, but the data can easily be eliminated via a Filter and historical data through a segment.

You can create a new segment and exclude sessions from Service Provider contains amazon.


Or you can use my segment which I built that excludes all Spam/bot traffic. https://analytics.google.com/analytics/web/template?uid=B38kBCpMR3-1KhO0krAudA