Very specific visitor drop

[MarcelMoz]

Hello there,

Last week I discovered an unnatural drop in the direct traffic channel while analyzing all traffic channels. I dived into the data and discovered the following aspects of the traffic drop:

The drop is only caused by:

• Direct traffic coming from browser Safari on Apple tablets (Safari traffic includes 83% of all direct tablet traffic)
• Android, mobile and desktop traffic didn't drop at all
• The direct tablet traffic dropped on the 1st of October
• It has never dropped before and it has grown naturally every month since more than a year
• In week 42 we only made 35% of the revenue we made in week 39. We're talking about k's.

I attatched two screenshots coming from Google Analytics: the drop of direct tablet traffic compared to direct mobile traffic, and the drop of direct Safari tablet traffic compared to direct Android tablet traffic.

We asked our web developer (SEOShop) about possible changes they made around the 1st of October to i.e. our mobile website. They said that they didn't change anything but they pointed to Hummingbird that has been released around that date. I can't link the traffic issue with Hummingbird though..

Can anybody let their light shine about this one? I'm very thankful.

Marcel

76gzsLx,fOlkm10#1

[MarcelMoz]

Hi Mike,

Thanks for this piece of information. This is exactly what happened. I checked the other side of the data: organic Safari tablet traffic and it has grown since the first of October.

Thanks again.

Marcel

[MikeRoberts]

This may help explain some things http://searchengineland.com/rejoice-safari-is-once-again-providing-google-referral-information-in-ios-168493

[GregB123]

It seems I recently read that Safari had some sort of code change that was causing GA to not track visits from those systems. But I have no idea where I read it. Probably worth a google search for something like "safari bug with google analytics"....