Direct Traffic has Dropped 48% to Last Year

[JimmyFritz]

Since February of 2013 our organic traffic at http://www.weddingshoppeinc.com had been declining. We were able to get traffic back up to par with numbers from the previous year by December of 2013. In March of 2014 our direct traffic took a major hit and hasn’t improved. We know our mobile traffic is part of the problem, but the issue has affected traffic from desktop and mobile devices.

Is this an organic traffic problem, or is our decrease in direct traffic coming from somewhere else?

Has anyone else seen this issue, or does anyone have advice?

Here is what we’ve already looked into and updates to note:

• Before this issue, when we compared organic and direct traffic, direct was usually half of what organic was (i.e., if organic was at 10 visitors, direct was at 5). However organic traffic has followed normal trends and direct has dropped.
• In August we updated our .net code to MVC to drop our first byte from 1,700 to 300 milliseconds. However, if you look at our m. site, it’s around 1,000 milliseconds.
• We changed our SEO strategy in May to follow best practices. We’ve been rewriting old content. We haven’t ever done any black hat SEO, just have some old blogs from 2010-2012 that have too many keywords. These are getting edited.
• In March we moved our images to a CDN for our images.
• We’re currently working on server errors and broken links, but nothing significant changed around March to affect our traffic.

Very recently, our web developers said that they believed our direct traffic had been getting tracked wrong in Google Analytics prior to March 2014. However they think they fixed the issue in a March push. We've taken this theory into account, but we also see a drop in revenue at the time of their push that correlates with the drop in traffic, so we know there’s a bigger issue.

Any input you can provide would be greatly appreciated!

[JimmyFritz]

Thanks for the feedback! We have looked at the mobile vs. desktop and both are down. I segmented just the mobile and it doesn't appear that any browser type is the cause. I do recall us reviewing the iOS issue awhile ago but that didn't appear to be the issue we saw this March. The missing direct traffic has not moved to another channel either and online sales have decreased so we haven't been able to identify this as a incorrect GA implementation.

We have seen some issues with organic traffic too. Since a certain amount of direct / none traffic is organic, do you think this could be an organic SEO issue? The percentage decrease of direct traffic is higher but the actual decreased number of sessions for direct/none and organic are comparable.

[Andy-Halliday]

Hi

There was a Google Update in March: http://moz.com/google-algorithm-change

Developers have a tend of not implementing GA properly and tracking things incorrectly - our developers do it all the time.

If your developers are saying its been tracking wrong, which channels have been affected, are these channels now up and Organic down since they made the changes.

If you have access to Search metrics - has your Search Visibility dropped over the same time period.

I would then do some further digging as Fabio touched on, and as well as what devices aren't performing as well, what pages aren't performing as well. What has changed on these pages.

Or is it a simple case - you have stayed pretty still and your competition has caught up to you and over took you?

[fabioricotta-84038]

Hi Jimmy,

Any chance you split that traffic by Mobile vs Desktop and then on Mobile traffic check the direct traffic by device? Sometimes it is related to a specific device or browser that is sending the wrong referral data.

I remember this Cyrus post, about Bing traffic (https traffic) showing as direct traffic. And there is also a post by Shahzad Abbas from Define Media on iOS traffic messing up with analytics reports. Maybe you can read those and have some insights.

Cheers,

Fabio