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SOLVED

Bot, or something more nefarious?

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Level 4

Hi, 

I am going into a rabbit hole at the moment and would love to hear some more thoughts/ideas.  A client has some traffic that showed up coming from a singular domain (allstream.com), on an old browser (Chrome 59) and a singular OS (Windows 10)  it jumped out because as you can see it is almost a flat line (there are never flat lines in analytics unless the value is zero. and Chrome 59 is like 18 months old.

pvvuv.jpg

So I created a segment, isolated the traffic and "voila"  As you can see after December 22nd the page views, visits and unique visitors line up exactly.  Before you ask, I cannot look at IP addresses.  The client obfuscates them, but I am trying to get my hands on the server logs. They only hit the homepage, visits are less than 15 seconds, there are no campaign IDs.

My questions are:

  1. What is it?
  2. For December 20th, how can there be more visits and visitors than page views?  I can't even imagine what the server call would look like for this.
  3. How can someone be getting a new MID each time (creating a new unique visitor)?  We're using ECVID and it tries really hard to match users.

Thanks!

1 Accepted Solution

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Correct answer by
Employee Advisor

Very likely a bot, running an older version of a browser, that rejects all cookies outright (or accepts them and clears them after every hit).

Page views can be lower than unique visitors if the visitor(s) in question only hit custom link calls during their visit. That is a distinct possibility here, especially if they're not allowing cookies to stick around.

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1 Reply

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Correct answer by
Employee Advisor

Very likely a bot, running an older version of a browser, that rejects all cookies outright (or accepts them and clears them after every hit).

Page views can be lower than unique visitors if the visitor(s) in question only hit custom link calls during their visit. That is a distinct possibility here, especially if they're not allowing cookies to stick around.