A million visitors sounds like success—until bots swamp your site. Here’s how I cut the noise, fixed conversions, and got real traffic back.
Cart Sessions
Cart sessions measure visitors who start shopping, not just browsing. They’re the ones with the most potential to convert.
Think of it like a brick-and-mortar retail establishment. Some people might enter, glance around, or use the public restroom and leave. The ones who place things in their shopping carts have the most potential. The ones who pay during checkout are customers.
The online visits where people place something in their digital carts are sessions. Reasons for aborting cart sessions include poor images, descriptions, high prices checkout prices—often due to shipping.
It’s not always possible—particularly for international orders—to include free shipping. You can sometimes raise prices to subsidize or eliminate them for most goods. This is more difficult for commodities—items available from many retailers. Now your markup depends on competitor prices.
Dividing the number of cart sessions by the number of checkouts provides a conversion rate—normally a key metric for determining site efficacy.
Too Many Visitors
Now, imagine if your retail store became inundated with tens of thousands of shoppers per day who bought nothing. It could create chaos and require more oversight resources.
That happened to my website when cart sessions traffic reached a million sessions in 30 days. Then there was a sharp upward trajectory to nearly one hundred thousand in one day. Most site owners would relish the problem, but suspected something was wrong.
The visitors weren’t human. Most were from countries that have never ordered products due to high shipping costs. Whether it was AI scraping, link farming, or site cloning wasn’t clear—what mattered was that it wasn’t real shoppers.
The motives weren’t clear, but I had to take action. Conversion rate skewed to zero. An AHREFS report listed some trashy link-generating sites. I used Shopify analytics with other third-party tools to identify countries and IP addresses.
How I Solved It
A modified Robots.txt file plus a comprehensive third-party app that can block access from countries, bots, VPN, IP addresses, and more cut the visits back down to a normal range.
Which would you prefer: Inflated traffic reports or analysis closer to human visitors? If you ever become inundated with non-converting visitors, there are ways to take action. Drop a comment below.
Are you interested in ways to grow natural traffic? See the article entitled 12 Strategies to Build Site Traffic.
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To support the writing of useful articles about website, ClinicalPosters sells human anatomy charts, scientific posters, and other products online. You may sponsor specific articles or remit a small donation.
ClinicalPosters sells human anatomy charts, scientific posters, and other products online to offset expense of the writing useful articles about website. Slide extra posters into DeuPair Frames without removing from the wall.
ClinicalPosters sells human anatomy charts, scientific posters, and other products online. You may remit a small donation.
You can support the writing of useful articles about website by sponsoring specific articles or remitting a small donation. Story includes one or more generative AI images to help readers visualize scenes.
