Increase of direct traffic
-
Hi everyone,
We have a weird issue in our Google Analytics account. We have enormous amount of direct traffic, but not to our homepage, but to blogs that are published and posted to facebook.
e.g. yesterday we did a post and it received 3.500 visits of which 2.900 were direct.
I'm unable to figure out how this is possible. 90% of the direct traffic comes from mobile phonesAnyone has an idea?
-
Morning Martijn,
This is our Facebook page. As far as I can see Hootsuite does not include UTM tags.
We've implemented GA via GTM, but all the tags are fired OK.Thanks
-
Hi, what would be the full URL of these post including all the UTM tags? There could be the problem as something could be missing there.
-
Hi Tom,
Thanks. The site is a simple WordPress site. We use Hootsuite to post to social.
I've been checking the logs, but all the traffic via the ow.ly links are treated as medium facebook.comBased on the post that is receiving massive amounts of direct traffic (2.900) 1.600 is Android 1.300 is iOS
-
Hi there
It's important to remember that "direct" as a source does not only mean people who have entered the URL in their browser and come directly. It also groups in any traffic that Google Analytics is unable to identify the source. So for example, if someone comes to your site via one of the Facebook ads or another ad across the internet and, for some reason, GA loses the original source, it will group it into direct.
I imagine this is what's happening here - along the way, GA is losing Facebook as the referral source. Without knowing how your site works, this might be because of redirects or mobile sites or something else. What would be interesting to see is which mobile devices are coming in as "direct", are they iPhones, Androids etc? Might be device related. You can see that by segmenting your traffic and going into Audience -> Technology.
Hope this helps.
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
-
Slow growth in organic traffic
Hi, Recently our website after 5 months of launch started seeing more organic traffic, thanks to the seo effort being put. However, off late the growth is quite slow and we don't see much increase in organic traffic any more. Any idea on what could have happened to cause this or is it normal. Here is the link to the website to check and if you can recommend anything - https://www.keyhub.com Thanks, Search-Console-Search-Analytics-https-www-keyhub-com-1.png
Reporting & Analytics | | kh-priyam1 -
Help Blocking Crawlers. Huge Spike in "Direct Visits" with 96% Bounce Rate & Low Pages/Visit.
Hello, I'm hoping one of you search geniuses can help me. We have a successful client who started seeing a HUGE spike in direct visits as reported by Google Analytics. This traffic now represents approximately 70% of all website traffic. These "direct visits" have a bounce rate of 96%+ and only 1-2 pages/visit. This is skewing our analytics in a big way and rendering them pretty much useless. I suspect this is some sort of crawler activity but we have no access to the server log files to verify this or identify the culprit. The client's site is on a GoDaddy Managed WordPress hosting account. The way I see it, there are a couple of possibilities.
Reporting & Analytics | | EricFish
1.) Our client's competitors are scraping the site on a regular basis to stay on top of site modifications, keyword emphasis, etc. It seems like whenever we make meaningful changes to the site, one of their competitors does a knock-off a few days later. Hmmm. 2.) Our client's competitors have this crawler hitting the site thousands of times a day to raise bounce rates and decrease the average time on site, which could like have an negative impact on SEO. Correct me if I'm wrong but I don't believe Google is going to reward sites with 90% bounce rates, 1-2 pages/visit and an 18 second average time on site. The bottom line is that we need to identify these bogus "direct visits" and find a way to block them. I've seen several WordPress plugins that claim to help with this but I certainly don't want to block valid crawlers, especially Google, from accessing the site. If someone out there could please weigh in on this and help us resolve the issue, I'd really appreciate it. Heck, I'll even name my third-born after you. Thanks for your help. Eric0 -
Huge Spike in Direct Traffic from IE7
Our site is seeing a huge spike in direct (none) traffic from IE 7 from July 8, 2014 - on. June 25 - July 7 showed 21 direct visits from IE 7; July 8 - July 20 is showing 5,889 (an increase of 27,943%). All traffic from the spike is going to our homepage. Other Google Analytics' stats for this direct (none) IE 7 traffic: Bounce Rate: 99.52%
Reporting & Analytics | | SJVC_Susie
Avg. Session Duration: 0:02
Pages/session: 1.01
Mostly all new users What's strange is that the traffic is from a variety of cities and networks. What could be causing this? Has anyone experienced this before?0 -
Google Analytics: How to Track Blog Traffic that Enter the Purchase Funnel?
I've been trying to figure this out for awhile, but I have had no luck. The current ecommerce store that I work for is trying to find out how to track how many people coming in via the blog are converting/buying. The site lives on Magento and the blog is on wordpress and they both use the same Google Analytics code. Site URL: http://website.com/ Blog URL: http://website.com/blog Is there anyway to do this so you can see which landing pages are driving conversions? If not, Is it possible to set up Google Analytics to show conversions and revenue coming from people who enter through blog directory?
Reporting & Analytics | | Erik-M0 -
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 -
Webmaster tools traffic on one keyword dropped through the floor - ideas?
Hi there, We design and sell our own product range in a narrow niche, and we are also stocked by Amazon and a lot of other big retailers in the UK. During the first two weeks of Dec 2012 the position of one of our main keywords, which was in google SERPs on page 1 (8 or 9), dropped to page 4. The keyword describes the niche we're in. The drop is shown in the webmaster tools traffic report for that keyword. But it's the only one of our keywords where this has happened, and furthermore it hasn't happened for variations of the keyword. And in Adwords our quality score for the keyword is 10 For example say we were making and selling shopping trolleys - our keyword "shopping trolleys" has dropped through the floor, but "shopping trolleys (on) wheels" is just fine. Can anyone shed any light on what's going on here? Losing this one keyword has cost us some good organic traffic. i1uxSlB.png
Reporting & Analytics | | w1ll1am0 -
Big Traffic Drops in Bing
I have a client that has been struggling with their organic traffic the over the past several months. We figured they had been hit by Penguin and some of Google's other algo changes...But I just dug in a little deeper in Google Analytics, and their traffic is actually up year over year for Google organic, but they are down 75% + for both Bing and Yahoo organic. They drop seemed to occur around April, 2012, and they have rapidly lost Bing and Yahoo traffic ever since. Can anyone help explain why this might be happening? A Bing and Yahoo algo update? Or just fewer people using those search engines possibly? I'm not quite sure how to make up for all the lost traffic in Bing and Yahoo. Any suggestions are appreciated!
Reporting & Analytics | | BlueTent200 -
Magic UVs - PPC landing pages delivering organic traffic by magic...
I have checked and double checked this. GA is showing over the last couple of weeks mysite.com/ppc/landingpage1 as a landing page for organic traffic, where it shouldn't. Main facts: The entire /ppc/ folder is blocked from the googlebot, and doesn't appear on any internal site maps. As far as I can tell, these pages have never been cached for the main index. I cannot recreate any of the organic searches myself (i.e. typing in keywords that triggered the traffic, even the almost unique long-tail ones). We just don't appear in the organic listings with these pages. The analytics and adwords accounts are linked. We are not paying for this mystery traffic through our PPC - these keywords are not appearing in our AdWords account (though other keywords / traffic are). The traffic is real - we have received phone calls from these pages, tracked to the visits recorded as organic These pages should only receive PPC traffic. They are receiving organic traffic also, but I can't recreate it. Can anyone suggest what's going on? I'm concerned about duplicate content issues and also skewing the analysis of the PPC campaign. Thanks
Reporting & Analytics | | RobPell0