Pages per Session below 1?

Hi,

I don’t think it’s related to this plugin. I have just been looking at my stats, but couldn’t find the same thing on any of my websites.

The peak in traffic, was that around the same time when the average pages per session was low?

Hi,
Thanks for the quick reply!
Yes, I first noticed it at the time that the traffic peaked, and then a few times since then during normal traffic periods. One other thing…I’ve seen traffic peaks like that many times, and when I check the referrers I see a spammy one like boost-my-site.com or trafficgenius.xyz, which I then set filters for in Google Analytics. However with this peak 2 days ago there was no spammy referrer, and the referrer numbers looked normal (no peak).

I would just give it another week and see what happens. It should be OK. I’d like to hear though if other people have to same problem.

Cheers

OK, I’ll keep an eye on it. Thanks.

Hi. I got another major peak today. Drilling into GA, I saw the following:

SOURCE: WordPress/<Username> (this is not the real username)
SESSIONS: 209
% NEW SESSIONS: 0.48%
NEW USERS: 1
BOUNCE RATE: 0.48%
PAGES / SESSION: 0.06
AVG. SESSION DURATION: 00:00:18

Does this give an indication of what the issue is? I set up the plugin to fire every 10 seconds, and I’m not firing on scroll.
Thanks.

Have you already looked at the raw access file to see what happened?

I looked through the cPanel raw access log and see lots of activity around the time of the spike, but haven’t been able to make sense of it yet… One observation though, every time I’ve seen the spikes it has roughly corresponded to the times that ManageWP (Orion) is performing backups from a remote site. I can see some activity from their IP addresses in the access logs, but I haven’t been able to correlate a peak yet. Will keep looking. Might this be a cause for the spike and <1 pages per session?

How is it going?

It’s still happening every 2-4 days. I’ve been looking at Google Analytics. When there are spikes, the source of most (if not all) of the sessions is WordPress/[username], and the medium is always “social media”. I’ve replaced the actual username with [username], and it’s always the SAME username in all cases. Today there was a spike between 5 and 6AM (Eastern Time), and all of the spike sessions came from Melbourne (I assume Australia). During any one spike they all come from the same city, but it’s not always the same city. Examples are John Creek, Addison, Friday Harbor, Melbourne, Sydney, Cleveland… Average session duration is under 5 seconds, pages per session are 0.07 or less, bounce rates are mostly less than 1%. I haven’t been able to come up with an explanation so far. Do you have any ideas?

It’s really strange. I have no idea how to get 0.07 pages per session. Should be at least one, right?

Another thing I’m thinking on is if it is possible that someone uses your Analytics snippet on their website. But also that wouldn’t make sense with the lines above.

The social media medium could be the answer. Maybe there is some script that goes wild when a certain page opened?

I don’t know if it is useful to ask this question at Stack Overflow? There are pretty smart people over there…