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.
-
Sounds like you might have a problem with multiple instances of Google's Google Analytics tracking code on your site. Check that first.
-
I agree. You should get with your host and review your websites server stats. This will give you more detailed information about where the traffic is coming from. Hopefully not bots!!
In the event that it is, this would explain why the average visit duration has dropped so drastically.
Also keep in mind that if there is actual new traffic coming to your site (not bots), this could also be contributing to the drop in visit duration as new site visitors tend to spend less time than a returning visitor.
Hope this helps!!!
-
Check with your hosting provider. They should be able to tell you if your website is being accessed unnaturally.
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
-
Increase in Direct traffic, drop in Google traffic, after updating Google Analytics settings.
I made some changes to our Google Analytics property settings (see notes in screenshot). As a result, there was an equal drop in Google traffic and increase in Direct traffic. Has anyone else seen something like this before? I'm wondering if I should revert. jE7buO6
Reporting & Analytics | | vcj0 -
Google Analytics - Average Position
Hi Just trying to get some clarity on Google Analytics Average Positions in "Aquistions/Search Engine Optimisation". For a very competitive keyword Google Analytics is saying i am on average position of 6. Is this Page 6? I am assuming position six would be 1.6?
Reporting & Analytics | | Cocoonfxmedia0 -
An overnight substantial drop in visit duration while amount of sessions grew.
Hi, My Ave. session duration has dropped from 2:10 to 0:14 overnight. At the same time, amount of sessions from all channels grew on average of 56%. This increased (and I guess low quality) traffic is coming in from multiple regions, languages, devices and channels. I was not able to pin point it to 1 source, location, landing page etc. See enclosed screen shot. I would appreciate if anyone can shed some light on what's wrong and if there are any SEO implications. Thanks. pxWQX2E.png
Reporting & Analytics | | Amis0 -
Unique Users higher than Session on Google Analytics
How could us have a situation in Google Analytics where the unique users for given page is higher than the number of sessions?
Reporting & Analytics | | cbarron0 -
Deleted Rarely Visited Pages - Traffic Dropped (Big Time)
Hi folks: I'd appreciate any thoughts you might have on a problem I am having with organic traffic. One of our sites has about 500 pages/blog posts. We had about 200 pages that no one was visiting, or only one to ten people had visited in an entire year. As a result, we decided to experiment, and delete any page which had fewer than 5 visits in a year. This resulted in a deletion of about 90 pages.We did this on April 6 or 7 of this year. Two days later, we had a substantial drop in visits to the site. We had been getting about 300 sessions a day. Now, we are lucky to get that in a month. I know there was an algorithm update in late March, but our traffic dropped about two weeks after that, and a day or so after the deletion of the pages. There is a clear demarcation on analytics. I gave it a month, the traffic did not recover, so we decided to restore the pages. Traffic has not recovered and it has been about 3 months now. Does anyone have any thoughts on why we might have experienced such a drastic drop as well as what we might do to recover from it? Thanks very much
Reporting & Analytics | | jnfere0 -
Changed URL's, traffic dropped from 2k week to 1K week. Need advice!
Hi Mozers, I recently changed my URLs for my ecommerce site and my traffic went from 2,000 visitors a week to 1,000 visitors a week, over a 3 week period. Traffic is down, so are unique Kwds. I need advice on why this happened and what I should do moving forward. To brief, I have a ecommerce website, www.ecustomfinishes.com. I noticed pattern that a lot of my URLs with a unique URL structure (URL.Com/ProductDescription/ProductName) were getting a lot of entrances ~30-50 a month, and others that followed the path of my subcategory (URL.com/SubCat/Product) were getting 0-3 entrances a month. The seo pattern was that those with unique product URLs were hitting long tail Kwds, and those URLs with /subcategory/product were getting far less traffic. I changed 150 or so urls to be unique. Good idea, I thought. Since then: CON: Since then my traffic dropped from 2200 visitors a week to 1100 visitors a week. -25% week to week, over 3 weeks CON: # of non-paid keywords sending visits: -25% week to week, over 3 weeks PRO: my Urls receiving entrances +10% week to week, over 3 weeks REF: http://imgur.com/GwZT8 Question: What are your best suggestions moving forward? Any advice is much appreciated, Thank you!!! abBN3
Reporting & Analytics | | longdenc_gmail.com0 -
Large recent drop in "Domain Authority" and backlinks through OSE
Hello, I've noticed that our sites domain authority has dropped enormously this past week according to Open Site Explorer. It also shows us as having lost about half of our backlinks. Google webmaster tools doesn't show a corresponding drop in links and we haven't done anything to our domain recently. Anyone have any ideas what might have happened? Our site is at: http://www.GoldMaxUSA.com Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | JFritton0 -
Has Anyone Else Noticed A Jump In Google Analytics Traffic Since Session Parameters Were Changed?
Ever since Google Analytics changed their session parameters August 12th I have seen a 20% jump in organic traffic & bounce rates along with a decline in pages/visit and conversion rate. To be clear, I don't put a whole heck of a lot of stock in these metrics as stand-alone indications of how my site is performing. I'm just trying to get to the bottom of this blip. I noticed some other people mentioned a similar phenomenon in other SEO forums and blog comments, but nobody seems to be talking about this here at SEOMoz (unless I just haven't looked in the right place). I'm not saying the change I noticed has anything to do with the session update, I'm just wondering if anyone else has experienced something similar so that I can either cross it off the list of possible causes or explore further.
Reporting & Analytics | | eTundra0