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What is a Traffic Spike? Definition and Website Analytics Causes
A traffic spike is a sudden increase in website visits, events, errors, or conversions compared with the normal baseline. Spikes can be good, bad, or meaningless depending on the source and quality of the traffic.
A product launch, viral post, newsletter, ad campaign, bot attack, crawler, or tracking bug can all create a spike.
Common traffic spike causes
Traffic spikes can come from:
- Viral social posts
- Newsletter sends
- Paid campaign launches
- Product announcements
- Search ranking jumps
- Press mentions
- Bot traffic
- Scrapers
- Uptime monitors
- Tracking duplication
The first step is to identify whether the spike is human, automated, expected, or broken.
How to investigate a traffic spike
Segment the spike by source, referrer, page, country, device, browser, and user agent. Check whether conversions, errors, page speed, and bounce rate changed too.
A spike with high conversions may be a growth opportunity. A spike with strange user agents and no engagement may be bot traffic.
Why alerts help
Traffic spikes are easier to handle when teams are notified quickly. Alerts can help teams watch launches, monitor errors, and detect suspicious traffic.
Swetrix supports live visitors, traffic analytics, alerts, and bot protection so teams can understand spikes in context.
Related terms: alerting, bot traffic, live visitors, and traffic channel.
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