1. Hello Guest!

    Thank you for visiting the ClubRunner Community website, you can login using your ClubRunner account information by clicking the login link on the top of every page.
    Dismiss Notice

What are these page accesses?

Discussion in 'General' started by Mark WILLIAMS on Nov 2, 2021.

  1. Mark WILLIAMS

    By:Mark WILLIAMS-  Nov 2, 2021
    Active Community Member

    Joined:
    Feb 14, 2018
    Messages:
    57
    Likes Received:
    30
    Gender:
    Male
    Occupation:
    Engineer
    Location:
    Network Engineering
    After I sent out the weekly e-bulletin yesterday, all these weird page accesses started showing up in our google analytics. I am assuming they result from people clicking on links in the email. If I manufacture the URL from the entries (e.g. rotary9620.org/stories/ymfsbgv0lw/ then I get a 404 page doesn't exist error.

    My major concern is that some people might be getting invalid links (I have never seen one in an e-bulletin myself and nobody has complained, so I am hopeful this is not the case) but there is also the concern that even if these accesses do result in people getting to where they want to go, my Google Analytics data is not useful because I don't know to which page/event/story they refer.

    --mark

    2021-11-03_094922.jpg
     
  2. Zach

    By:Zach-  Dec 2, 2021
    Moderator
    ClubRunner Team

    Joined:
    Jun 5, 2017
    Messages:
    592
    Likes Received:
    80
    Gender:
    Male
    Occupation:
    Product Specialist
    Location:
    ClubRunner
    Hi Mark,

    Apologies from the delayed response. I suspect that these are possibly bots, crawling your website, looking for pages that do not exist. If you try to navigate to those pages, you should observe that they're not present. However, it is a "valid" page from the application, and displays an error. I'm surprised Google is treating these as valid pages, as we do return a 404 error.

    Example: https://rotary9620.org/event/bwvudgfslw


    I am unsure how you can filter those bad data points out, but suspect that the Google Analytics help articles should be of some assistance.
     
  3. Mark WILLIAMS

    By:Mark WILLIAMS-  Jan 25, 2022
    Active Community Member

    Joined:
    Feb 14, 2018
    Messages:
    57
    Likes Received:
    30
    Gender:
    Male
    Occupation:
    Engineer
    Location:
    Network Engineering
    That's plausible and I'll investigate down that line. However, I am skeptical because these types of access come in gusts after I send out an e-bulletin, just as regular accesses do. I would expect bot activity (and we certainly have some of that as well) to be uncorrelated with member activity. Other bot activity that I can identify is definitely uncorrelated with legitimate traffic.

    My strongest suspicion is that it is somehow incorrect information being passed to the GA plugin.

    --mark

     
Top