Invisible web traffic occurred lately?

Why invisible web traffic occurs and how to prevent them with modern traffic analytics tools. Improve your web traffic easily with this steps.

invisible web traffic image

Invisible web traffic was always there though webmasters didn’t know how to prevent those. Before starting the article, we will share with you one important thing that you must know. The traffic is always invisible, if you have no method to track your website visitors. Therefore, you always need a service to measure your visitors on the web pages. 

Let’s talk about web traffic tracking services known as web analytics software. Mainly, big companies such as Google, Facebook, Wordpress, Amazon have their own solutions to track their customers with advanced measuring techniques. For example, they have the ability to track the user based on the IP address, Geo-location and device information. Then they log all data into a raw datastream which they can use later for advanced report processing. Considering the information they processed, the management can identify trending keywords, hotspots on web pages, and user interests which means their sales can be improved if they follow the final report.

Evolution of web analytics

After 2005, many companies started to share their big data for commercial purposes. For example, Google introduced Google Analytics (GA) which helps a web developer to track their visitors using a small JavaScript. You simply register your gmail account and use this service for free, under their limits. Otherwise, you can pay a subscription to unlock all features on GA. Does it sound like a piece of cake?

Big data always includes a trash collection. For example, if you receive bot traffic from a search engine crawler, social media bot, or any other similar, the embedded JavaScript can track those visits and store them in the datastream for future use. If you are a Google Analytics user, you must have experienced this before with your traffic report. A lot of non-monetized traffic without any conversion can lead to frustration, if you are a serious marketer. This is why traffic analytics software always tries to refuse bot hits, dark traffic and any other worthless traffic for the webmaster. Let us call these refused traffic as invisible traffic from now.

Why is invisible traffic always there?

It is technically impossible to avoid invisible web traffic and you must let it happen naturally. However, we have identified the main reasons for this kind of website visitors. Let’s discuss them one by one,

  1. Web browsers block JavaScript that tracks visitors' data. For example, Brave browser has an inbuilt shield protection for its users to block mainstream data collectors. 
  2. Internet Service Providers (ISPs) can block data collecting mechanisms, depending on the country they are from. As you know, EU countries have implemented strict policies such as GDPR to protect their people from privacy theft. China, Russia and some other countries can affect US based services like Facebook, Google, Twitter, etc.
  3. If your server has a low bandwidth or less infrastructure to handle a huge traffic, it can fail to serve all visitors and the traffic will not be tracked very well. Some free CDN services including CloudFlare limit the visit for free users. In case a Jquery based website loses its access to the main library, the whole website can be broken for the visitor and it will be random. Big shopping carts lose a lot of customers due to these CDN issues, starting from 2018 cyber attacks.
  4. Web tracking services serve a lot of users and they are significantly slow and unreliable. For example, using Google Analytics can slow down your website’s loading speed dramatically as Google’s page Speed Tool illustrates on its reports. There is always a high chance that your web traffic analytics will not be 100% correct and it can have a lot of invisible traffic.

There may be other minor reasons though we keep focusing on the above mentioned. Please note that invisible traffic is not dangerous, just simply it cannot be traced by one tracking software. 

How to avoid invisible web traffic?

As we discussed above, some reasons are far away from your limits. If you have a good server without technical errors, it will be the best you can do from your angle. Somehow, you can use more than 2 different tracking software to trace your online visitors and compare the final result using your own solution.

From our experience, there were 10-20% invisible traffic before the year 2018. After that, some mainstream data providers were hit by privacy laws from different countries. Using cookies without user’s concern and tracking personal data were marked as cyber crimes which led big companies to change their technical design to avoid legal issues. Google Analytics was one of the known services that were affected by cookie policy. And everyone knows how Apple and Facebook struggled with their privacy policy rules.

Nowadays, it is common that you can reach upto 50% invisible web traffic due to above mentioned problems. If you are a digital marketer, this may have made a real pain in your work, even if we always have to respect the law. This may have caused financial losses, trust issues between you and your clients, as well as duplicate the work load. As one of the best and oldest web communities in the world, we find ways to help your online business from our best.

  1. Always let your customers know the current situation. Just educate them by explaining data protection laws and technical difficulties with the web tracking industry. Improve the trust between you and your clients to avoid misunderstanding.
  2. Google Universal Analytics (UA) was the all time gold, though they have introduced Google Analytics 4 (GA4). As we can see on the internet, GA4 has many bugs and problems compared to UA. We have noticed that GA4 takes 4-6 hours to update the reports, which can be a problem for you. Please stay calm and wait a few more hours to see results.
  3. Mainstream data can be inaccurate due to privacy problems. Websites such as SimilarWeb, Moz, Hypestat, and others can always generate false reports as GIGO occurs (Garbage In Garbage Out). If you really want to improve those ranks, send more traffic than before, so you will get good results.

As mentioned above, you need more web traffic to satisfy mainstream data as they have reduced the amount of data they collect. Sending more traffic is the solution and we are here to deal with it.


invisible photo
Developer Dilantha

Written By Developer Dilantha

September 29, 2022, 12:39 am
Hi, my name is Developer Dilantha, a creative blogger who writes popular blog pages in the Alexa Master Community. Are you wondering about becoming an active blogger? Just create your free alexamaster user account today and start changing the blog world!

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