Identifying and Excluding Technical Direct Traffic

Reports and working with data
1

Hello,

My traffic is largely dominated by direct traffic (64%), coming mainly from desktop (82%), with sessions shorter than 10 seconds (96%), and mostly from Chrome.

According to ChatGPT, this is likely caused by technical or speculative traffic (browser preloading, previews, automated scripts). What do you think?

If this is the case, I would like to hide this technical traffic. I was planning to create a segment and exclude traffic that comes from the direct source, with sessions shorter than 10 seconds, and desktop devices. However, I can’t seem to get the right result (I’m using AND, as OR doesn’t seem more relevant to me).

Could you help me find a solution?

Many thanks :slight_smile:

2

Hi! That sounds plausible. If you want to investigate it further - you can look for “suspicious” sessions in the tracker debugger and check their user agent, as well as the behaviour (what events happened and on what URL they land on).

You can find instructions on how to find the user agent (and ignore it in the future if you think it’s a bot/crawler): How can I ignore traffic from bots and crawlers? | Piwik PRO help center

Regarding the segment, could you share a screenshot with the setup?