Direct traffic will completely mess up your adsense stats

[SEOPTI]

It comes with a "direct traffic" spike in analytics. Bot and other non-human traffic will appear in analytics as direct traffic, as soon as this happens (a direct traffic spike) CTR in the adsense interface is half what it was in my case. It seems bots force the ads to load or reload. I see direct traffic fluctuations in analytics from 10 visits a day to 2000 visits a day, then back to 10 again.

At least earnings will stay the same.

Also screen resolutions, bounce rate, time on site and other stats don't add up any more when this happens, it makes most of the adsense and analytics reports worthless.

[incrediBILL]

Bot and other non-human traffic will appear in analytics as direct traffic

That would be incorrect.

Most bot and non-human traffic, except screen shots, don't run javascript therefore have zero impact on analytics. Javascript must be executed in order to impact GA or AdSense. Those bots and non-human accesses only show up in your raw log file reports, not 3rd party javascript analytics.

Also, Googldoes sort out well known screen shots and other known javascript executing bots as well, so Ask, Bing and Snap screen shots also aren't being reflected.

Just setting the record straight ;)

[Leonard0]

I see direct traffic fluctuations in analytics from 10 visits a day to 2000 visits a day, then back to 10 again.

Check your server logs to see if most of the direct traffic is from one IP or if the user agent has a bot name.
If it is from one IP and has a bot name, it may be a legitimate bot that Google doesn't know about.
If the traffic comes from a single IP, maybe the IP is an anonymous proxy - an indication that the user is up to no good. Possibly a pay-to-click sabotage attempt that Google has filtered the clicks/earnings from.

[SEOPTI]

Thanks for the answers. I always wondered about heavy fluctuations in CTR and the direct traffic is 100% the cause. Every time it is up, the CTR and eCPM are down with earning remaining the same.

This has been happening to all of my sites for months. Direct traffic spikes from bots which must have the ability to load the ads, probably a javascript client which reloads everything a few thousand times a day.

Today I've been investigating the logs and found an IP from a German SEO firm. I will check that IP if it is not used by more companies. The combination of Linux and Firefox 7.0 (if it's not faked) loads javascript in this case.

176.9.38.139 - - [03/Nov/2011:19:32:59 -0400] "GET /news/js/jquery.jsab.min.js HTTP/1.1" 200 4701 "http://www.example.net/state/city/business.html" "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686; rv:7.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/7.0"

This is not the only IP. I see tons of Bot behaviour and who knows if all the bots are able to act like a javascript client? Look at this one:

150.70.64.197 - - [03/Nov/2011:18:55:10 -0400] "GET /news/js/jquery.jscroll.min.js HTTP/1.0" 200 14360 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)"

It looks automated with 50-100 requests per second. I will ban the whole IP range forever.

What I want to say, if you see wild fluctuations in CTR and eCPM check your direct traffic numbers, this can be the answer.