Very Unusual Traffic Patterns In GA4

[Bill Hoerr]

Howdy DealerRefresh,

I have never encountered this situation before. One of my GA4 properties is receiving a large amount of other hostname traffic. It is not traffic landing on our site, it is traffic to other dealer websites being pushed to our GA4.

1. The Situation​

• I've noticed strange traffic patterns in our Google Analytics 4 (GA4) this month.
• Our data now includes information from multiple dealerships across the U.S.
• This is not our normal traffic and it's skewing our analytics.

2. What I Think Happened​

• I believe a 3rd party partner of some kind accidentally put their tracking code on multiple dealer websites.
• This means we're getting data from sites that aren't ours.

3. Detective Work So Far​

• I've ruled out our tag causing this (it's not identified on these other sites).
• I’ve ruled out a majority of our 3rd party marketing partners that we use.
• I've contacted a few of the 3rd party partners with no resolve.

4. Other Clues​

• We're seeing lots of traffic from 3rd party partner source/mediums.
• Most of the source / medium traffic are labeled email campaigns and upon reaching out to these partners, a majority use SiteImpact.
• We don't work with these companies.

I have exhausted internal and 3rd party resources to try and resolve this. If anyone has any guidance here, that would be great!

Thank you!

 

[Greg_Gifford]

ok - without seeing your GA account, this is really hard to answer... but you say it's traffic for other dealerships - can you tell which ones? That would be my next step... If you can figure that out, you can go to that site and check the code to see how your GA code got added... it could be the website provider as well (they make mistakes all the time)

but you also say it looks like email marketing traffic - that would definitely be a third party tool/vendor - could be that they work with some dealer group that has a GA ID that's only one number off of yours, and someone fat-fingered the number when they put it in... that would explain why it's multiple dealerships (it's more likely that a single mistake was made than that your code was entered multiple times on other properties)

in the meantime, it's definitely worth setting up a filter to hide all that extraneous traffic

 

[Bill Hoerr]

ok - without seeing your GA account, this is really hard to answer... but you say it's traffic for other dealerships - can you tell which ones? That would be my next step... If you can figure that out, you can go to that site and check the code to see how your GA code got added... it could be the website provider as well (they make mistakes all the time)

but you also say it looks like email marketing traffic - that would definitely be a third party tool/vendor - could be that they work with some dealer group that has a GA ID that's only one number off of yours, and someone fat-fingered the number when they put it in... that would explain why it's multiple dealerships (it's more likely that a single mistake was made than that your code was entered multiple times on other properties)

in the meantime, it's definitely worth setting up a filter to hide all that extraneous traffic

Yes, I can see the dealerships, I've combed through 50 of the listed dealership websites to see if our tag was placed, but it is not. I have checked with my web provider and they investigated but could not find the issue and they do not "Recycle tags." I'm not so sure and will continue to push this route.

Regarding email... most of the source/mediums we are seeing are email campaigns according to source/medium/campaign/content. I contacted a few vendors (Identified from source/medium) and the common denominator is the majority use "SiteImpact" for email marketing services. I am working with their reps to see if it relates to SiteImpact.

I appreciate your reply and suggestions Greg!