Last Thursday, we reported on unusual huge spike of traffic that were marked as direct traffic sources in analytics. I initially blamed Microsoft, because they are a fun target to blame (no seriously), over Internet Explorer 7 having a bug but that was wrong.
It was an issue with AdRoll, a retargeting advertising solution.
AdRoll officially commented on our site admitting fault after being called out by customers earlier in our comments as the source of the invalid traffic.
AdRoll wrote:
It seems like AdRoll will need to refund a lot of money to customers and lock down their ad network even more to these types of abuses.
Here is one chart showing the severity of the increase in fake traffic:
There are temporary solutions to filter out the traffic from your Google Analytics reports, if you want.
So if you use AdRoll, you will want to look into this and make sure you get credits.
Forum discussion continued at Moz Q&A, a WebmasterWorld, UK Business Forum, Twitter and Google Analytics Help.
Update: AdRoll sent me this statement:
