Our Firefox organic traffic seems to have been re-allocated to direct - anyone know why?!
-
In Google Analytic, the majority of organic traffic via Firefox browsers to one of our websites suddenly dropped off, and an immediate lift in direct traffic via Firefox browsers appeared.
This trend has continued ever since. I've searched to find Firefox releases that might have affected it (eg. security/cookie settings), but haven't been able to find anything, or talk of this happening to other people, and the anomaly doesn't appear in our other website analytics either...anyone have any ideas?!
The attached GA graphs show Firefox browser versions 21.0 and 22.0, but it's the same story across all versions. (You can also see that I'd also filtered out traffic via IOS 6 and Android 4 operating systems to remove any effect from these known issues).
Thanks for any help that you can offer!
-
I was curious about this, so I poked around in the metrics of some of the websites I work on, to see if I could find anything similar (big increase in Firefox (direct) traffic). I did find that about 80% of all Firefox traffic from mobile devices was showing up as (direct) traffic.
The sites I work on get very little of this type of traffic, so I hadn't really noticed that previously. In the data I looked at, it didn't really seem like that recent of a change, however. Maybe you've had a recent surge in mobile traffic? I think Firefox mobile traffic is typically from Android devices.
-
that makes a lot of sense browsers switching to SSL by default I bet by now it's more than just Safari on iPhone's doing it.
Thank you EGOL
sincerely,
Thomas
-
Just read how Apple has been blocking lots of search query data and making it look like "direct". This explains why my direct data was ramping up in 2012.
http://searchengineland.com/ios-6-removes-all-google-search-referer-data-134560
-
I agree with you I think Google is messing with the data quite a bit and looking at Google analytics everything you say makes sense.
I still see the big drop however the drop is not as intense for instance it shows approximately twice as many visitors as hubspot is showing.
The GA and kiss metrics version of what I can see is dramatic in the middle of July as well.
For instance kiss metrics shows a fall on July 4 where hubspot shows what is seen above.
I think Google could be blocking quite a bit of data coming out.
sincerely,
Thomas
-
Mine looks similar to that.... but my drop did not occur until July and was not as dramatic as is shown on your chart.
Something is going on. Google is messing with the data.
-
you are absolutely right. Thank you for having me do that in fact as you can see direct traffic and organic traffic has fallen off a cliff this shows the beginning of June until today.
So the traffic went from approximately 20,000 visitors a day down to approximately 2000 visitors a day.
Almost all of it was direct traffic before does this match with what you had seen?
As far as the amount of direct verse organic?
thank you sincerely,
Thomas
-
Go back one month. I bet you had a lot of direct in mid July that dropped in late July or the first week of August.
-
Here is a general outlook from HubSpot this is a site I'm working on.
The blue equals direct traffic the green equals organic search the orange equals referral and yellow social media.
When I go back in my analytics I get about the same portion of organic verse direct.
Is this something that looks odd to you or do you think this is in line with what you see as well?
I'm sorry I cannot show the numbers for you I hope you guys understand.
Sincerely,
Thomas
-
I am using Clicky.com for my analytics. My direct traffic started an unreasonable climb over one year ago. Showed a huge drop in early August but now is back on an unreasonable power climb. It has to be google. I know its not bots or course management systsms. And, there is no other reason for me to be getting that much traffic from direct visitors - although I do have a lot of direct.
-
Hi EGOL you bring up a great point I just checked my Google Analytics and found the exact same thing.
I agree it has to be a change with Google in fact I have almost 100% direct traffic via GA but HubSpot shows me much more it must be Google changing things however check out hubspot and you'll see what I mean.
Sincerely,
Thomas
-
I am getting amazing amounts of this "direct" traffic.
It has to be smoke from Google.
-
it appears this is very common.
if I were you I would set up accounts with alternate analytics providers and see what you get.
Or
mix panel does not cost anything to use when starting out. I would utilize them as a backup to Google analytics
if you're using WordPress a free plug-in is available here
https://github.com/zippykid/mixpanel-wordpress
a alternative is to use https://segment.io/ either with Google analytics or without it this will allow you much more granular control over GA or whatever analytics provider you choose.
To fix this problem though I would
Here's some more information on how to fix this
http://www.orbitmedia.com/blog/inaccurate-google-analytics-traffic-sources
if you scroll down in this link and you will see someone talking about JavaScript errors in Firefox on Windows 8
http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/analytics/QUgzuaabqVs
https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/2558811?hl=en
One recommendation is to set up campaigns and use URL builder
https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1033867?hl=en-GB&rd=1
sincerely,
Thomas
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
How to filter out traffic from subdomain using regex?
Hi There, We have a test server that lives on a subdomain which we'd like to filter out in Google Analytics. We're using the hostname filter but are having trouble understanding the regex needed, we're using this as the filter pattern: .domain.com. Will that work? The profile is new so we can't test the pattern. Any pointers in the right direction would be much appreciated. Cheers Ben
Reporting & Analytics | | cmscss0 -
20% Dip in Traffic. What could be happening?
Hello Dear Community Yesterday I had a sudden drop in visits - screenshot attached. It shows how yesterday Friday 17/10 has had a dip in visits vs Friday 10/10 (1 week ago). I have an authority blog in Italy with over 90k monthly visits. I do now black-hat SEO stuff, and my content is rich. Organic traffic grew 85% y-o-y and I was actually on a nice, slow growth trend, but now, 20% dip. The things I did before all this happened, and which could have had an impact (but I'm not sure about) are: Configured Max CDN and W3 Total Cache (before I was just using SiteGround's Super Cacher plugin and that's it). So now my site is faster by a lot although I'm having issues like I mention in point 2. I had to clear the cache at least a hundred times as I was configuring Optin Monster for lead generation I changed my Google Analytics code from the old version to the new version (universal) Besides this I check my best keywords in RankTracker and it looks like nothing happened to my rankings. Yet a few of my most popular posts which gets roughly the same amount of visits everyday for the past few months, had a dip of 30% more or less. I also added a screenshot of my Webmaster tool dashboard. Everything is ok and there are no messages. Also yesterday was not a national holiday in my country (Italy) so everything should have been normal. Please share with me your thoughts about this. What else should I check to get an idea? What do you think it could be? Thank you! Andrea 2vII81q yXn6zBD
Reporting & Analytics | | Andrew_IT0 -
Why my WMT is showing more clicks than my Google Analytics Organic Search Traffic?
Hello Everybody, Can somebody help me figure out this puzzle: My WMT is showing 6000 clicks, while my Organic Traffic in Google Analytics is showing only 3500 daily ... how is that possible? Best Regards
Reporting & Analytics | | Muhammad_Jabali0 -
Why My Site Got 1000% increase in organic traffic from day to night?
Did Google run any update Monday or recently? My site www.shirts4geek.com, strangely had a 1000% organic traffic increase from day to night. I didn't do anything in this site for long a time... but Monday I had a lot traffic coming from organic and every other day this week the site is doing extremely well on traffic and sales. I'm ranking first page for many keywords relate to my products. I wish I could figure out what happens so I can replicate it. The site has very links and the On Page Optimization is kind of basic. Does any have any idea how it could be possible? Have any one seen something similar lately?
Reporting & Analytics | | Felip30 -
Improved keyword ranking but less traffic
Hello fellow mozzers! My collegue and I are a bit puzzled in regards to our recent website statistics. In november 2013, we upgraded the technological platform of our website to be fully HTML5 coded, and implemented the schema.org Products scheme to systematically tag all our products on the site. To prevent too much loss of visitors, we created a 301-redirect table from almost all our old URL's to the specific new ones, as we implemented a new URL structure as well. The first few months were bumpy as expected, making a huge drop in rankings before rising up again. Our keyword rankings are better then ever (60% of the keywords in top 3, average competition, 25% more on first SERP) but our number of visits dropped by about 10%. Our bounce rate went down from 20% to 14%, our returning visits are stable, but our new visitors stats dropped by 25% as well. This comparison was made between equal periods in the current year and last year, using organic data stats. (new technical platform vs. the old one) What could be the reason that our number of visits dropped 10% while our keyword ranking is better then ever? We don't have any manual penalties in GWT and can't understand why visits would drop so much while ranking improved. May it be so easy that there's just less search volume on our ranked content or does anyone have other ideas? Thank you all in advance!
Reporting & Analytics | | EconostoNL0 -
Google Analytics Organic Search Keywords Suddenly Displaying FulL Urls
In my Google Analytics, the top keywords for Organic Search are suddenyl displaying full URLs. For example, now the third and fourth keywords are http://www.domain.com/highly-specific-URL. These have all started recently around the same day, July 12th. I've checked back, and we've made no internal changes to the site around that time that could affect this. Any thoughts on this? Thanks! P.S. It might be related to rich snippets, but I cannot tell at this point.
Reporting & Analytics | | 10SL0 -
I have data missing in Google and don't know who to turn to for help
Hi everyone, I know this isn't the 'Google help forum' but I'm stuck and I hope someone here might be able to point me in the right direction. For a period last month - Thursday 22nd to Sunday 25th November Google Analytics reports our site as having 0 visits. In addition we have two days which were strangely low - Weds 21st 105 visits, Weds 28th Nov 78 visits. We normally get between 1000 and 1200 visits on a weekday from a global audience (I know that was the Thanksgiving weekend, but the US accounts for ~10% of total traffic). Has anyone else had this problem? If so, what did you do? The "report a bug" board on the Google help forum has a few entries like this, people with 0 visits shouting "help!" into the void with no response. Ideas?
Reporting & Analytics | | StevenHowe0 -
Traffic Drop with no real explaination?
Hello Everyone, On one of my sites PokerOnaMac we experienced a 75% drop in traffic in about a week (since September 3rd). I took a look at GA and the penalties have been applied sitewide. I also checked my Google Webmaster Tools, and there are no messages regarding "unhealthy link structures." We have had other sites penalized by Penguin & Manual Removals, but they are recovering now. What is my best bet to find what is wrong? Thanks
Reporting & Analytics | | BestOdds0