Seeing some strange channel traffic in Google Analytics

unidentified source in channel report

[RIOtraining]

Hey All

Just launched a new website last week and in the Acquisition > channels section, "other" is the largest portion. Under sources, I see a whole bunch of strings of numbers like so: 6-16_16-7_18-9-20_1-14_8-16 and 20-23_4-2_1-14_8-16. "Email" is listed as a source also.

What are these weird strings of numbers?

cheers

Rio.

[RIOtraining]

Bumping up here. any ideas from the learned readers?

[RhinoFish]

The default channel definitions is likely where you should start:
[support.google.com...]

Note: (Other) and Other Advertising are not the same. (Other) is where traffic gets tucked when it fails to fit into the ones listed at the link above.

And look inside your Analytics, because default channel criteria are editable.

There are many ways Google can identify the Source, Campaign, and Medium, one way is to pluck them from inbound URL requests,
So I could enter [yourdomain.com...]
And these values would post.

Analytics needs Source, Medium and Campaign values to be valid, and it needs to fit them as the link here says.
So if somebody builds a sloppy crawler, and it cranks out weird utm values, you'll see weird values.

Dig into where the traffic lands, see if you tell if someone or something is aiming at certain pages.
You might even have tools that check your own website, and they issue weird params in the URL or encode strange chars, that Analytics will misunderstand.

[RhinoFish]

Within (Other), when you're viewing Source, or Source / Medium, add Campaign as the Secondary Dimension.
You might just see someone's crawler or ad server listed, most crawlers and linkers tend to nail down the Campaign name pretty well.

[vanesadawson]

Hi,

May be it will be showing the age group of audiences. If there is email source then would be something else.