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Category: Reporting & Analytics

Discuss the best ways to report on performance and communicate results to stakeholders.

  • Webrevolve


    Hey guys, I have a pressing query that's really puzzled me! I've just been going through Google Analytics and noticed that there has been a complete drop off of all my organic visitors from May 7. All other traffic mediums are unaffected so there is no issue with the Analytics code recording visits. I haven't received any penalty and my rankings have actually improved in the last month. This is proper bizarre. Any ideas? MjLmL70.png

    | Webrevolve
    0
  • RosemaryB


    My client manages 15+ websites and we have observed the spam referrer issue has gotten steadily worse and worse in the last few months.  I took the time to weed out the worst offenders via traffic filters but our referral traffic source garden was quickly full of weeds again a few weeks later. Does anybody know what the Google Analytics development team is doing to combat the spam referrer issue?  I find it quite amazing that Google goes through the asinine effort to block out organic keyword data ("not found" & "not provided) but they don't seem to care about blacklisting/filtering spam referrers. RHnE6Wx

    | RosemaryB
    3
  • BT2009


    We moved to a CMS (Webhook) and when we did that organic traffic and direct traffic swapped places. Since we moved it organic traffic is down by about 400 visits and direct traffic is up by 400 visits. I went through the list below and confirmed everything is working. The http refer wasn't being passed for a couple of weeks but the issue was resolved and the organic traffic issue is still ongoing. Is there anything else that may cause this issue? I confirmed the issue isn't one of the below problems. during http to https redirect (or vice versa) the referrer may not be passed incorrect subdomain or cross-domain tracking can strip the referrer. 302 redirects sometimes caused the referrer to be dropped problems with cookies being lost/corrupted. javascript missing from certain entry pages (means any further page view looks like a direct)

    | BT2009
    0
  • donsilvernail


    I manage WordPress multiple sites for my clients. Some of these clients are SEO customers. One issue I have with the analytics reports is the occurrence of spam and ghost spam. I know how to create filters to block however there are always more and more. Is there away to export the filter and import it to all the other properties i manage? Or do they just have to be done manually every time i need to block spam?

    | donsilvernail
    1
  • T-wrench


    We have a site that was at a 32 domain authority in December, and our competition as usually been about a point or two behind us. But since December, we have fallen a point or two after each index and are now at the point of 26 and our competition is up to a 33. The competition did fall a point or two but were able to regain what they lost. We publish original content blogs over 600 words per blog targeted at our audience twice a week and post to all of our social media channels and have guest blogged linking back to our site. We also updated the look of our site to be mobile responsive to comply with Google's mobile indexing. I did find some spam feed burners linking to our site over 4,000 times and have since disavowed those links. Has anyone experienced a decline in domain authority in the past few months and have you been able to turn it back around? Is there something that we should look at fixing or something we are missing that could help bring our numbers back up?

    | T-wrench
    0
  • Whittie


    Hi all, Looking through Analytics yesterday, I saw that my website had a huge increase in direct traffic in sessions. However, they apparently spent 0 seconds on the website in total so that raised plenty of red flags. Does anyone have reasons why this might be? Spam or bug? Thanks in advance!

    | Whittie
    0
  • Chermak


    When analyzing a keyword ranking, our term is consistently on P1 P3-5.  Looking more closely, I find that the numbers don't make sense to me. Our competitors have lower Page Authority 3s, lower # Root Domains Linking to Page, Lower Domain Authority 3#s and lower Root Domains linking to the Root Domains Linking to the Root Domain #s. What explains the  consistent_ ranking discrepancy? Any ideas?_

    | Chermak
    1
  • LesleyPaone


    This one is stumping me and I need some help. I have a client who's site is www.site.com and we have set them up a CDN through Max CDN at cdn.site.com which is basically a cname to the www.site.com site. The images in the GWT for www.site.com are de-indexing rapidly and the images on cdn.site.com are not indexing.  In the Max CDN account I have the images from cdn.site.com sending a canonical header from www.site.com but that does not seem to help, they are all still de-indexing.

    | LesleyPaone
    0
  • renehansen


    Hello all, I am having an issue with tracking the sales on a webshop, and I would like to know how I can enable the ecommerce tracking with Google Tag Manager? Right now I am tracking the pageviews fine, firing a Universal Analytics tag. How can I achieve this? Thank you.

    | renehansen
    0
  • PaddyCoop


    I'm new to website building and have recently set up some links by submitting my website in directories and have also got some people in the same industry to link to my website. But they aren't being found in moz analytics. Does it take time or should they be getting found?

    | PaddyCoop
    0
  • Firestarter-SEO


    I have a website I work with and for the past month we have a reported 36,834 sessions and 25,490 pageviews? How is this possible? If a users comes to the site isn't that a session and a pageview? Or How can you have a session with out a page view?

    | Firestarter-SEO
    0
  • Leithmarketing


    We filtered bot traffic from one of our Google Analytics accounts and traffic is higher than with the unfiltered view. Does anyone have an idea what might be causing this?

    | Leithmarketing
    0
  • KasperGJ


    Hi. Im runnning a couple of sites. And in my analytics/webmastertool I get both traffic on domain.dk and domain.dk/default.asp which are both essentially the same page. I'm pretty sure it would be better, if I somehow could make the default.asp "redirect" to "/". I dont wanna loose the linkjuice thou. Any smart suggestions for an easy fix? /Kasper

    | KasperGJ
    0
  • irapasternack


    In researching the issue of referral spam, there is no shortage if info, both on MOZ and beyond. But, neither the Google Analytics Blog or Help Forums seem to mention the issue at all. I'd think it is something that they would want to get rid of, yet it seems like they don't even acknowledge that it exists. Anyone have insights into this? Am I missing something, or is Google strangely silent on an issue that is becoming more and more annoying for anyone trying to use GA data?

    | irapasternack
    1
  • RASEO


    Hello, I have a question about my company's new website. I've worked in SEO and studied Google Analytics results for a few years now but have never really come across something like this. I started in this position in January of this year and when I started breaking down the traffic sources in Google Analytics, I noticed most of the traffic was coming from Google.com as a referral source. I had never seen Google.com as a referral source before so I looked into options for what it could be. It was not a paid ad and our organic traffic was coming through in Analytics, Before I could get any further, our new website was launched (we switched CRM's to WordPress) and the referral traffic from google went from 2,966 in January of 2015 to 22 in February 2015. for more comparison, in February of 2014, the referral traffic from Google was 2,496. I expected a drop when we switched CRM's but we correctly re-directed all pages and created a new sitemap and our organic traffic is up since the switch (not enough to cover drop in referral). I thought at first this had to do with our Google sellers account being de-activated when we made the switch, but I quickly fixed this over a month ago and no change. I'm wondering if anyone has ever seen Google.com come through as a referral source in Google Analytics and if they we're able to figure out what it actually was. This would be a great help! Thank you, Alex

    | RASEO
    1
  • evansluke


    Our site gets a significant amount of traffic from Venezuela, about 9% based on our Google Analytics (the US being 63%). According to Webmaster Tools we get 48% of our clicks from Venezuela. That discrepancy is massive, considering we are an English site. My theory is that they are not allowed/capable of using secure search in Venezuela for some legal reason and therefore their searches are much more 'visible'. Does anyone have any insight?

    | evansluke
    0
  • copyjack


    Hello, everyone - I'm looking for guidance on how to block or filter referral spam in Google Analytics. But I'm needing to block for an entire network of Wordpress websites. We have two networks which total over 2,500 websites. We are currently blocking sites we find out about via htaccess. This works, but only after we see we are getting hit with the spam. Updating 2,500+ Google Analytics accounts with filtering is not an ideal option due to the time factor and the fact that new bots coming out almost daily. We can continue the htaccess method, but does anyone have any other ideas for blocking referral spam for a large network of sites? These are the other ideas we have. 1. Blocking all traffic from Russia and China based up subnets. We know many will still get through, but it should block 50% of it, we hope.
    2. Moving sites to Google Tag manager.  This is a huge tasks but we have seen that sites using Tag Manager are not effected, at least for now. Other ideas are appreciated!

    | copyjack
    0
  • gamezitecouk


    I get this in my clicky stats now and again. From googling I'm still not clear what it is doing. Any ideas.

    | gamezitecouk
    0
  • Kingalan1


    Our site has only 87 referring domains (with at least 7,100 incoming links). LinkDetox has identified 29% of our back links as being toxic and 14% as being questionable. Virtually all of these links derive from spammy sites. We never received a manual penalty, but ever since the first Penguin penalty in 2012 our search volume and ranking has dropped with some uneven recover in the last 3 years. By removing/disavowing toxic links are we risking that over optimized link text will be removed and that ranking will suffer as a result? Are we potentially shooting ourselves in the foot? Would we be better to spend a few months building quality links from reputable domains before removing disavowing bad links? Or toxic links (as defined by LinkDetox) so bad that it should be a priority to remove them immediately before taking any other step? Thanks, Alan

    | Kingalan1
    0
  • varo


    Hello Guys, I want to create such type of funnel from where i know after checkout step 3 this visitors selected credit cart and then move to Thank you page and this many visitors selected paypal and move to till thank you page. Is it possible if yes then how? Regards, john

    | varo
    0
  • Stamats


    Hi: We've recently taken over the hosting of a client's web site.  Is there a way to move the Google Analytics tracking from the old host's account to the client's account without losing all the history?

    | Stamats
    0
  • PeaSoupDigital


    Afternoon, I noticed a spike in impressions over a couple of days in April, so I investigated Analytics to see where these were coming from. It appears these impressions were split between two URLs; one was a blog post, the other was the Buffer link to the blog post that we used on Twitter and Facebook. According to Analytics, this Buffer URL received 1000 impressions over two days, with an average SERP position of 16. This surely can't be right, can it? Is this just another Analytics quirk? After two days of a decent amount of impressions to this Buffer link, the amount of impressions dropped to pretty much zero. I know Tweets are now starting to rank, but this would be the Twitter URL, not the Buffer link to our blog post? Any ideas, Cheers, Lewis

    | PeaSoupDigital
    0
  • MarkWill


    I have recently moved to WordPress (from DNN) and I am very pleased with the change. As part of this switch I took the opportunity to totally revamp my posts, in terms of their URLs, titles, content, etc. I also put 301 redirects in place from the old to the new URLs. Despite the redirects, logs suggest I have tons of 404s to my site. My site has been around for 20 years this year so I am not particularly surprised by this. Many of these broken URLs are one-offs (and I have no idea why they come in :)) and I am not worried about them. But over the years I have apparently had various versions of the same content, with different types of URL structure. By way of example, if I look at .aspx requests with "human readable" URL (where the URL is obviously an article/post) I have almost 2,500 such requests generating 404s in the last week or so. My question is how much effort should I put into creating 301 redirects for these old ULRs? I see the recent changes as something of a fresh start so part of me wants to just ignore them and let search engines figure out the new URLs naturally (which seems to be happening). But I also wonder about how much SEO magic I am throwing away here - is it worth spending time reviewing these old URLs, identifying the new URL and implementing a redirect? That's a very time consuming process but I can make it happen if there's real value in doing so. On a related question, once a search engine detects a 404 is it "done" with that 404 for good? For example, if Google tries to access a URL and finds a 404, does it just wipe the URL and never try again? If so, that presumably means - for that search engine - there's no point in the redirect being in place. It's too late at that stage, right? Thanks. Mark

    | MarkWill
    0
  • fivefifty


    I have a question for any Google Analytics wizards out there. We have two clients that have a similar complication when it comes to tracking goal conversions in Analytics. Basically, all the conversion actions we want to track occur on a separate website; either an iframe embedded on the page or through an entirely different ordering website. Trick is, Analytics sees the source for all these conversions as referrals from the main site. We'd like to get visibility back to the original source/medium that brought visitors to the site before they converted. Anyone have a suggestion for making that happen?

    | fivefifty
    0
  • varo


    Hi, I have implemented enhance ecommerce with tag manager after that all working fine but bounce rate suddenly started reducing. Then again i implemented ehance ecommerce then mobile bounce rate also started reducing. As per me tag assistant showing okay. Can you please check my attached site and let me know the issue? Thanks! John

    | varo
    0
  • Stamats


    I've seen 4webmasters.org/default.apsx as a referrer, but now it's showing as top page visited.  How is this happening and how do I fix it?

    | Stamats
    0
  • edward-may


    Hey Guys, I'm hoping someone can help - I'm in the midst of a site re-design - whilst one of our biggest reasons for the redesign was to create more space to write valuable content and unique content I have been reading other posts on moz about content auditing.  I have come across a few articles in my own blog that are from 250 - 300 words to which the articles seem similar and the traffic is low. I'm wondering while I'm left to consolidate these articles and create a fresh article for each entry that is more in-depth, when I consolidate or delete these pages - do I need to inform google these pages have now been deleted? If so using Wordpress what is the best way to do this? Cheers and would appreciate some advise Thanks

    | edward-may
    0
  • One2OneDigital


    I'm receiving a number of spam referrals in GA. This is also coming up in content drill down. For example mysite.com/www.pornhub-forum.ga I'm under the impression this is ghost spam and does not affect my site in anyway - just my data. I believe the fix is to filter it out in GA. Can someone confirm this is correct? Thanks

    | One2OneDigital
    0
  • RosemaryB


    We have a client that migrated to https last September.  The site uses canonicals pointing to the https version. The client IT team is reluctant to put 301 redirects from the non-secure to the secure and we are not sure why they object. We ran a screaming frog report and it is showing both URLs for the same page (http and https).  The non-secure version has a canonical pointing to the secure version.  For every secure page there is a non-secure version in ScreamingFrog so Google must be ignoring the canonical and still indexing the page however, when we run a site: we see  that most URLs are the secure version. At that time we did not change the Google Analytics setup option to use: "https" instead of "http" BUT GA appears to be recording data correctly.    Yesterday we set up a new profile and selected "https" but our question is: Does the GAnalytics http/https version make a difference if so, what difference is it?

    | RosemaryB
    1
  • RosemaryB


    We have encountered a situation where a client's old SEO firm is refusing to grant us Admin access to our client's existing GA account.  For security purposes (so the other SEO firm doesn't delete the existing GA profile) we have started a new Google Analytics profile.   Again we do have access to the data in the old account.  Is it possible to migrate this old data over (if we just have user access)? Thanks for the help

    | RosemaryB
    0
  • RangeMarketing


    Hello! I want to track calls on mobile devices from a website. I was able to successfully set up an event with Google Analytics that tracks when a user clicks the phone # on the website, however, as you know, when someone clicks a phone # using iOS it prompts a display of the # and gives the users two options, Cancel or Call. My question: is there any way to track when the user clicks the 'Call' action? Thanks

    | RangeMarketing
    0
  • Ideas-Money-Art


    Hi mozzers We are setting up an a linkedin ad campaign for our agency and want to track its traffic and conversions. The linkedin ad will carry UTMs for each link. For tracking this campaign accurately I thought about creating a new GA View with a specific filter. So my question is about the filtering, should i use the INCLUDE, REFERRAL with pattern LINKEDIN.COM (see image)? if not what would be the best way to track this campaign? My other concern is that we are also running other a job ad on linkedin and I feel these hits will be tracked as well. Is there a way to separate those 2 campaigns? Thanks guys! MzE5hqE.png

    | Ideas-Money-Art
    0
  • katandmouse


    Every small business client has the same thing. 5 impressions for keywords, row after row, every single month. Why exactly 5 and why month after month the same thing? I see this in every local business I work in - and for very important phrases! It's gotten to the point that I think those are fake and I just look at the impressions that have numbers great than 5. Obviously I have to get their impressions up, but what am I to believe about these?

    | katandmouse
    0
  • varo


    Hi, I have implemented enhance ecommerce checkout option like paypal, credit card but where it will reflect in google analytic? - https://developers.google.com/tag-manager/enhanced-ecommerce#checkout John

    | varo
    0
  • AMHC


    Our flagship website, up until March 16 was getting 1600 impressions and 300 branded clicks per day as per GWT. After 3/16, branded search fell to 300 impressions and 25 clicks per day. Our rankings haven't changed, and neither has our traffic. We would definitely notice the decline in GA and Core Metrics, and it is running about the same. according to GWT, 75% fewer people started searching for our brand on 3/16, but all of our other metrics are indicating otherwise. Has anyone seen this before? Is it a tracking issue on our side?

    | AMHC
    0
  • varo


    Hi Guys, I want to check search engine traffic or direct traffic of mobile, how to check in google analytic?

    | varo
    0
  • Amr-Haffar


    Hi there, I have been reading about setting up goals in Google Analytics. There is a 20 goal limit, but I have many goals that I want to track (basically I have many thank-you pages that I would like to track). What is the best way to go about setting up more than 20 goals? Thanks

    | Amr-Haffar
    0
  • Obbserv


    Hello everyone, Whenever any user searches for our website using brand keywords, session count should comes under direct source instead of Google/organic. Or in simple language, We want that all our brand keyword search traffic should be consider as Direct Traffic instead of organic. Is it possible in Google Analytics? If yes then please share the steps of doing it

    | Obbserv
    0
  • Obbserv


    Hello everyone, We have to filter traffic from spam website like webcrawler.com semalt.com social-button.com etc. So we created custom filter with Filter field: referral Filter Pattern: Webcrawler.com|semalt.com|in-g61.mail.yahoo.com|d47c5f40.linkbucks.com|buttons-for-website.com|semalt.semalt.com|forum.topic34157145.darodar.com|social-buttons.com While verification of filter there is error displaying i.e. This filter would not have changed your data. Either the filter configuration is incorrect, or the set of sampled data is too small. Please help in resolving issue..

    | Obbserv
    0
  • varo


    Hi Guys, My bounce rate is normal 47% to 50% but after implementing enhance ecommerce it is showing 28% dont know what is the reason?

    | varo
    0
  • varo


    Hello Guys, Is there any way to check bounce rate of mobile or ipad checkout steps till thankyou page? Also separate Funnel visualization for mobile or ipad? John

    | varo
    0
  • Humanovation


    Our traffic has dropped 25% in the last 3 weeks while maintaining our keyword rankings.  At first, we thought it was due to the simultaneous change in Google UI where they removed the separators between ads and organic results.  However, now, we have also noticed that our user devices have gone from ~ 50% desktop/50% mobile to 20% desktop/80% mobile. Just food for thought ...

    | Humanovation
    0
  • rhgraves65


    We are a Hubspot partner agency.  I'm trying to find the best route for managing Google's tools as an extra resource for insight, not the primary basis for marketing effort.  I also want to explore adwords in more depth. Finding a lot of our clients don't have one or the other or both Analytics/Webmaster tools in place. Can I verify site ownership to set up webmaster tools simply by having admin access to their analytics account or will that require ownership of the analytics account? With Google merging things together these days I'm not sure of the best approach to take. Usually clients have their site hosted somewhere and built on some platform and ADD a Hubspot blog and the landing pages/cta's, Hubspot tools on a subdomain hosted by Hubspot.  Hubspot has tools in it's website settings for adding google analytics (actually it's just a field to add code to the header area).  If a client has universal analytics on their primary domain do I still need to go and add a separate analytics property for the subdomain and go through Hubspot's tools to install it on the subdomain? Or just use the same code from their primary domain and add it to the Hubspot header?  What is the best route? Any additional thoughts on this subject are welcome - with so much updating and changing coming from Google (and Hubspot as we implement 3.0 - COS) I'm trying to avoid wasted effort, outdated methods, etc. Thanks!

    | rhgraves65
    1
  • EcommerceSite


    I setup Google Tag Manager on this site- http://germanhausbarn.com I am trying to setup event tracking for the donate, newsletter, and Contact Us button at the bottom of the page. The most recent version is published, and I ran debug and it shows that they fire, but nothing is coming up in analytics. Any thoughts?

    | EcommerceSite
    0
  • varo


    Hi, Today i have implemented Enhance Ecommerce with GTM everything working fine but in google analytic > Behavior > Events here all events figure i see double - triple so not getting exactly what is the issue. Thanks!

    | varo
    0
  • Majsan


    I need to set up a goal using the G A API to trigger a pageview when someone submits a lead on my site. There's no "thank you"page currently. How do I go about it? There's no "thank you"page currently. How do I go about it? I have never used the API but am very familiar with analytics. Thanks!

    | Majsan
    0
  • varo


    Currently i am tracking thank you page conversion via google tag manager by doing following configuration in tag manager :- "Page URL Contains thankyoupage.html" But now i am implementing Enhance Ecommerce with tag manager with following configuration : - Custom event - "Event equals Transaction" I have test at staging level conversion working fine. But i have only one doubt that now I am implementing Enhance Ecommerce with tag manager so i have to delete old tag configuration right? i.e. "Page URL Contains thankyoupage.html"

    | varo
    0
  • varo


    Hello Guys, I have implemented enhance ecommerce ( i.e. - https://developers.google.com/tag-manager/enhanced-ecommerce ) Now i have query how drops off actually works? Like i visited the my site, then product page then checkout step 1 page after that i close the checkout step 1 page that means checkout step 1 drop off will appear in google analytic? right? John

    | varo
    0
  • varo


    Hi, In Google Analytic when i see Mobile Overview in secondary dimension when i select Mobile device Model and when i search Ipad then i can see ipad in tablet, desktop and mobile why is it so? Ipad traffic and transaction should appear only on mobile whey it is showing on desktop and tablet? John..

    | varo
    0
  • MartinePeters


    Just a simple question, because i need to use the word 'sex doll' a lot. Am i overdoing it? www.reallovesexdolls.com

    | MartinePeters
    0

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