How to find reason for spike in traffic to site?

[born2run]

Hi just this Nov 2 I had a spike of visitors which was 3 times more than normal in an hour.

I looked up google analytics to find the reason for this spike but couldn't find any -- I checked top referals, top content but no clue.

Can anyone please solve this issue for me here? thanks in advance!

[aakk9999]

It is difficult to solve this exact issue here as we cannot discuss exact keyword nor niche.

I think the best we can do is to offer some ideas to look at. You said you checked top referrals and top content but no clue. What does no clue mean? That the increase was equal across the board or that you cannot see any increase in referrals or top content you looked at?

Have you at least determined whether the spike is coming from organic traffic or from referrals, direct (or adwords if you are running them).

If it is from organic, then hopefully today or tomorrow you will have Search Queries data in WMT so you may see if there is a rise in a particular impressions and clicks.

I had a similar issue some years back and I tracked it to organic search increase that happened for an hour or so whilst there was a programme on TV about buying a particular expensive product in a particular location based niche the site was covered and ranked well for. During the TV programme the number of searches increased almost 100 times to what the average traffic normally was. So it could be something like this or even an article in the newspapers or similar.

But you firstly need to track down what drowe the traffic (which referral or which keywords or even whether it was a direct traffic) and then see where this may have been mentioned.

[netmeg]

Yea, I once was driven nuts by a 24 hour huge spike that made no sense at all until by chance I happened to mention in my mother's earshot, and she said "Oh that was a clue in the NYT crossword puzzle this morning!"

It can be as random as that.

[RedBar]

Can anyone please solve this issue for me here? thanks in advance!

A few weeks ago I had a massive spike, so big it actually took an entire month's bandwidth in a few minutes.

I posted on the Apache forum here with no luck, my host checked everything on their servers and couldn't find a thing and there was no DDOS, we never have found out what happened.

[rish3]

You mention that you have Google Analytics.

1. Set the date range for 7 days, including the date in question.

2. On the left hand side, select "Acquisition -> Channels".

3. Click all the boxes in the table at the bottom (Organic Search, Referral, Direct, Social Media, etc).

4. Click the plot rows button.

5. You should be able to see which source of traffic caused the spike in the graph.

6. Depending on the source, you may be able to click to a further level of detail. For example, if the spike is with "Social Media", you can click on that source, and see it broken down by "Twitter", "Pinterest", "Facebook", etc. You can plot these sources now, just like in step 4, and see the spike.