Universal Analytics - is it awarding traffic incorrectly ?

[Oxfordcomma]

A few days ago deployed a new site. A funny thing happened within one day. Google Analytics commenced reporting Organic traffic as lifting by 25%. At the same time Google Analytics commenced reporting that direct traffic dropped by 25%. All other traffic sources remained at the same level. This is all being reported through GA Universal. Has anyone experienced this before? Any advice is appreciated.

Also noted that with Google Webmaster is reporting, since the day of the new site deployment, a 40% drop in impressions and click. Reported referrals on this deployment day also went through the roof.

All of the Google tools I am depending on are not supporting my discovery of a solution to this. If anyone has been through this on universal analytics or traditional analytics please help! Offering lots of good karma points in return.

Cheers.

[Christy-Correll]

Hi, has this issue been resolved? We'd love an update, thanks!

Christy

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

Well pretty sure that's your problem as HTTPS sites to HTTP will drop the referrer and will make sure it's direct traffic.

[Oxfordcomma]

Hi Martijn, Yes - we did a migration to full HTTPS on the same day from HTTP. I believe this would have caused the shift in reassigning organic & direct traffic.

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

Are you on a HTTPS server?

[Oxfordcomma]

Thanks for the response Andy.

I have just messaged you the site link. So look forward to discussing and picking your brain on this.

Cheers

[Andy-Halliday]

While I do use GA, I am a skeptic and believe that the software does favour Organic and Paid traffic, to make you think you are more reliant on Google than you probably are.

But on the other hand, Groupon did a test and found 60% of its direct traffic was actually organic (http://searchengineland.com/60-direct-traffic-actually-seo-195415), but the problem is its all upto the browser passing the information back to which ever solution you are using to track traffic.

If you want to share your web url (either on here or in a private message) I will take a look for you and make sure when you switched you didn't make a minor error which is causing traffic to drop.

Which day did you see the movement, as earlier this week there was a lot of movement in the SERPs, Google hasn't confirmed an update, but its believed there was on (so it could just be related to this, rather than your implementation of UA).