Very specific visitor drop
-
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
-
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
-
This may help explain some things http://searchengineland.com/rejoice-safari-is-once-again-providing-google-referral-information-in-ios-168493
-
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"....
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
-
Drop in Domain Authority
Hi there, Our domain Authority has dropped significantly from 26 to 19 over the last month. This had been fairly stable over the previous 18 months. We haven't done any significant work to the website that I could point to. Does anyone have any ideas why this would happen? Any recent Google Updates that could be the cause? Regards Andy
Reporting & Analytics | | andy_simpson1 -
Specific Industry Website Conversion Rates: Lighting
Hi All, There's loads of info around on general retail conversion rates, but does anyone have any experience with online lighting shops and typical conversion rates? This is a highly price driven shopper, and from my experience so far they bounce around looking for the best price... We've recently taken ownership of this new site, and I'm not sure I can relate general metrics to this site... although there is lots of work to do on here! Cheers in advance.
Reporting & Analytics | | b4cab0 -
Average Session duration has dropped on May 12th and not recovered
Hello, On May 12th my average session duration within Google Analytics went from 1.12 seconds to 10 seconds. Every month since then it has had an average session duration of around 10 seconds. My traffic over this time has increased. I am concerned that the website is being attacked by bots. What should I be looking out for to work out what is happening? Many thanks for your help.
Reporting & Analytics | | mblsolutions0 -
GA visitor number inconsistencies?
Hey Mozzers Recently a client of ours undertook a paid campaign using Taboola and have a vast difference between reported clicks and visitors reported by GA. On further investigation the _utm.gif event is sent to google-analytics.com 50% of the time and stat.g.doubleclick.net the remaining 50% of the time Is this likely to be the cause of the discrepancy and if so is it possible to resolve this without removing the remarketing tag (which seems to be responsible for stats.g.doublelclick.net). Many thanks Justin
Reporting & Analytics | | JustinTaylor880 -
GA not recording visitors PART 2
Further to my question yesterday where all data for Wednesday 31st July 2013 was not showing - the data did reappear yesterday afternoon. But today, all data for yesterday seems odd - across all my projects visitor numbers appear to be around 40% down on the norm. Sales were normal, so I wonder if this is another glitch - anyone else seeing strange stats in GA for yesterday?
Reporting & Analytics | | FDFPres0 -
Tracking clicks from a specific link
Hi all, I'm looking for a bit of help with Analytics. I want to track the number of clicks that my main CTA generates over the course of the month. I've got all my goals set up correctly, but is there some sort of code that I can add to that specific link which will count the goal conversions which it generates? Do I need to set up something specific in GA? Thanks a lot for your help,
Reporting & Analytics | | theshortstack0 -
Drop in google referral traffic
Hi guys, As we know, GA shows google as traffic source in two ways: google / organic for organic searches and google.TLD / referral for everything else: google groups, base.google.com, static pages, google reader, google image search, google search appliance/mini. What we noticed is that around Oct 20th there's a huge drop of google.TLD / referral traffic to our site. Do you experience something similar? I couldn't find anything Google-related that happened around this specific date. We use GSA for our site search and I'm wondering if this could be the reason - maybe someone from our development team made changes to GSA settings that affected this traffic source. Looking forward to hearing from you! Thanks.
Reporting & Analytics | | lgrozeva0 -
Why is a section of our website dropping in&out of Google SERPs?
In July 2011 we started a news section that has it's own 'subfolder' /news/ (http://www.chorder.com/news/new_gear/, http://www.chorder.com/news/gear_deals/ etc.) The whole news section is dropping in&out of Google SERP's since late October, as show in attached graph. All news texts are real deal, written by our own staff, linked from homepage. Any idea why this happens and how to prevent it? cmqky.png
Reporting & Analytics | | imventurer0