Google Analytics & Lots of Russian Traffic

[Crystal Smith]

Once a month we take a look @ our website stats.  We took a look this past week & I was surprised to see 45% of those that visited our websites had Russian IP addresses.  Anyone else in the BP nation seeing a spike in web site visits from Russia?

[Tim Livian]

It's possible that it's bot traffic, you can check like this:

1. Go to the Country report
   
2. Add a Secondary Dimension for Hostname 
3. Then Filter for Russia.  
   1. If the hostname isn't the URL of your site it's probably bots
   2. You can also look at bounce rate and if it's like 98%+ it's even more likely its bots

What I like to do is create a copy of the View/Profile and enable the option to filter out bots.  This won't get all the bots, since there are so many out there.

The other thing I like to do is create a custom segment that filters out traffic that doesn't have the hostname equal your domain name.

+1 for WordFence

Sucuri is also a good security plugin