Suspicious traffic: spot bursts of fake visits

What it is

A Suspicious traffic card on your dashboard. It lists each day where one source or country suddenly brought far more visitors than usual and nearly all of them left after one page within seconds, with a View without it button.

Why it matters

Referral spam and cheap traffic bots can double a day’s visitors and wreck your bounce rate and conversion rate. Seeing the burst, and your numbers without it, keeps decisions based on real people.

How it works

1. When you open the dashboard, pageviews in the range are folded into daily totals per source and per country inside the database.
2. For each source and country, its usual day is the median of the other days in the range (days with none count as 0).
3. A day is flagged when it brings at least 15 visitors, 4 times or more its usual day, and 85% or more of them saw one page and left within 5 seconds (or with no engagement time).
4. View without it opens your dashboard with a “referrer is not” or “country is not” filter. Save it as a segment to keep it one tap away.

Set it up

Nothing to set up: it works with the standard one-line script.

<script data-host="https://quietstats.co.uk" data-dnt="true" src="https://quietstats.co.uk/js/script.js" id="YOUR_SITE_ID" async defer></script>

Privacy: what is and isn’t collected

Collected

• Nothing new: it reads the pageview totals you already have
• No visitor-level data is shown, only totals per day, source and country

Never collected

• Cookies, localStorage or anything else stored on the visitor’s device
• IP addresses or user agents (used in memory, then discarded)
• Anything that links a visitor across days (the visitor ID resets daily)

How quietstats works, and the legal caveats →

Rows and limits

• 0 script bytes, 0 rows written
• Ranges up to 92 days (7, 30 and 90-day views); hidden when a filter is on
• Heuristic: a real viral spike from a single page can look similar, so check the source before excluding it
• Known bots are already dropped by the collector before counting
• Rows: 1 read per dashboard view over the range’s pageviews

“Rows” are database rows written, which is what our hosting is billed on. Reads are not rows written. Methodology →