[Google Analytic Ghost Traffic]

We recently launched Rewave App. And saw something unexpected with google analytics : 1000+ monthly visitors to the website. This came without any form of advertising or social media marketing. In fact, we didn’t even promote the website to close friends. The conversion was poor though. We got about 13 clicks on the “Get App” button. That’s roughly 0.01% conversion.

But then, we were curious to see where this traffic came from, so we could optimize our website for them. We found that 68% didn’t have a default language set, another 12% came from Russia. This happened without SEO or contacts in Russia. In fact, we don’t have even a single follower on our Facebook page (http://facebook.com/rewaveapp) or twitter profile(http://twitter.com/rewaveapp) that remotely appears to be from Russia.

Similarly with the location, there was a large amount of traffic coming from a location in Africa with city as “Not Set”. We used google maps to figure out that this place is either Gabon, Nigeria or Ghana. At this point, we were certainly clear that this is not legitimate traffic, and hence poor conversion.

A little bit of googling help us found that this is called ghost traffic. And this doesn’t only effects the session count but leads to ghost referrers, ghost pageviews and even ghost events. For example, almost 42% of events recoreded were ghost events sent by a website called Event-Tracking.com.

We wanted to fix this asap. Qucik googling made us land on a great article titled, How to Fix Ghost Traffic / Spam Traffic in Google Analytics by Georgi Georgiev. It’s a must read of you are facing similar problem. It explains how to fix it.

The basic idea is you filter traffic by hostname. This solution doesn’t prevent the traffic from hitting your website, but just ignores it from entering in analytics reports.

Once we applied the filters as suggested by the above article, the graphs suddenly changed. Sessions dropped to 7.84 % of original, as shown below :

Other metrics also seem legit now. Now we see only 83 sessions in the last week with 74 unique users anf 116 page views. Now 13 “download app events” means roughly 15% conversion, however our sample set is too small to conclude anything about our landing page. But the initial traffic is cleared.

The orange line shows the real traffic and blue line indicated ghost traffic. As we can see, orange “All sessions” spiked a little when we launched, however blue “All sessions” spiked randomly. Similar trends were observed with others.

Make sure that you don’t have this problem with your site, and if you do, fix it and thank Georgi Georgiev for his great article.

All graphs and reports shown above are real analytics, snipped directly from Rewave Website’s Dashboard. Rewave is gesture based presentation remote app that runs over bluetooth and works with MS Powerpoint, Google Slides, Prezi, Slideshare, PDF and all others. It’s ideal for presenters who hate clicking the keyboard each time they want to change a slide. Learn more at http://rewaveapp.com or download the app here.

Header image by Nicolai Berntsen via unsplash.com

The case of 1000+ suspicious sessions was originally published in On the way to DS106 on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Read the responses to this story on Medium.

How to make your start-up team work ?

Its almost 2 years of working at Rewave (http://rewaveapp.com). 2 years, 2 team splits and 2 suspended launches later, I faced the problems a college going business mind might face while working in a team. This is a very (very) common problem where the visionary, with initial enthusiasm and charm is able to make a team (of generally two developers and 1 or 2 marketers) but is unable to keep them motivated. A part of reason for this problem is lack of experience and professionalism, both in the team and the visionary. Moreover, the visionary in this case generally is experienced (has worked in a corporate firm or other start-ups) but the rest of the team members are fresh (fuccha). Below are some of the reasons and possible solutions.

In big firms, employees have obligations, get paid but no such privilege in a start-up. Most of the times, there is no office — Find a co-working space, a room in your college or perhaps your hostel or your house, where you meet regularly (if not daily, then at least thrice a week), sit down together, talk for 20–50 minutes on progress and vision of the project and work together for 3–5 hours. This is the best time for the CEO to inspect the team, motivate them. If someone is not turning up for work regularly (and there is no legitimate reason for his actions), then the CEO must take charge and ask the person to move on. Remember not to fight with them, not to take their dignity. Ben Horowitz puts this very well at his lecture at Stanford University :

On how to fire

Generally the reason they fail in the job is, you made some mistake in the hiring process in that you didn't match them to the needs of your company accurately enough. That’s the #1 reason this fails. And that’s generally a good place to start: “Here’s where we are and here’s what I didn't recognize about us and about you when I made the decision, and now it is what it is”. You can take somebody’s job, you have to take their job, but you don’t have to take their dignity. On dealing with firing — “The right thing to do is to thank them for their work, let people know that they’re moving on, and you don’t really have to explain all their personal details. It’s more important to leave them with their dignity and let them go on to live another day.” Remember, what you say at that meeting, that’s their reputation.

Meet regularly, work together often and fire those who are not interested.

Employees don’t share the same vision, and hence cant stay on track — The CEO is motivated internally. He believes in the idea and there is something about the idea that drives him. The key here is to give that something to all other team members. A great example of this is Steve Jobs. I found an internal video of Mr. Jobs sharing his vision with his team at NeXT. He clearly states what a top level executive might tell his investors, but to his employees, the people who are going to realise this product. Once they have the vision they’ll be motivated. One of the comments in the video said something on the lines of, “He’s selling his product to his employees first.” and this is exactly what you want to do :

Sell your dream about your product to your team first.

Its hard to work without results, the initial pain is unbearable — If you don’t have customers, investors, a prototype and a product, your business doesn't exist. And it’s hard to work for something that doesn't exists. While you are building a product, you don’t know what its future might be. You don’t know will you be able to sell it (or even make it). And this situation is painful. Some start-up teams split even before a launch because of this pain (this happened with us). If the team is mature and experienced, this is unlikely to happen, but it case of first timers, the chances are high. To fix this, you’ll have to launch ASAP. And I literally mean ASAP. You might have a crappy implementation of your idea, but if you wait till you perfect it, you are already late.

If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you've launched too late. — Reid Hoffman

Once you are out on the grounds, you might face defeats, but this will certainly motivate you more than staying inside and waiting for a perfect product.

Launch the first version ASAP

Facilitate people to work and appreciate them — It’s difficult for people to figure out what to do. Once they know what needs done, they’ll probably do it. Work at a start-up is vague. For example, consider a dating site : The CEO tells the marketing guy, “We are almost ready for the launch, start building the social community”. Now assuming that this marketing guy is new or less experienced, the instruction given to him is vague. A better instruction would be, “We are close to a launch and I believe that social media is a very strong channel to reach out potential customers. I want you to take charge of this. We are not social media gurus but here are a few steps we should take, 1) Reserve our handles on twitter, facebook etc. 2) Follow the 1–2–7 rule, 3) Signup for buffer” and so on. Also instruct the person on what his duties after the initial set-up would be, like in this case it’d be posting on these channels at least twice a day and analysing engagement. The same goes for programming. Either you can say, “Build a dating app that runs on android and iOs” or “We’ll need to set-up an API first. Then we will create android and iOs front ends. I think we should use node.js for the backend, what do you think ?”. The idea here is to make a protocol for others to follow, so they don’t have to try the available options.

NOTE : This method needs you to be an expert in that field. If you don’t have expertise, find a trust worthy person who does and ask him for help.

Give people a protocol.

Once your team shows improvements, appreciate them with open heart and do it as publicly as possible. Be genuine with the appreciation and give credit where applicable, even if the person being credited is not present there. And if at all, you need to point out a mistake, do it privately. Nobody except you and the person being pointed out should know that a mistake was made.

Thanks for reading this far. Hope it helps you nurture your team. This article is in no way a complete handbook to how college teams should work and we know that you’d have also devised ways/tricks to make your team work. We will be more than happy to listen to your stories. Please comment below or reach us on twitter @rewaveapp or facebook http://facebook.com/rewaveapp.

How to make your college start-up team work ? was originally published in On the way to DS106 on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Read the responses to this story on Medium.