Traffic drop after analytics troubles
-
Hi
For two weeks we had an artifical low bouncerate & high pageviews/visit in our Analytics reporting. The day we corrected the bug in Analytics - our bouncerate & pageviews/visit returned to normal levels - however we saw our search traffic go down massively(-50% in sessions).
The bug in the Analytics was caused by a second Analytics tag which was included in an external script which interfered with our own tag. The drop in traffic occurred just after the removal of the second script (which was only on our site for two weeks). We didn't touch our own tagging - and there were no technical changes on the site during this period, and there is no seasonal trend which could explain the sudden drop of traffic. We double checked our tagging - and the analytics tag is present & working on all the pages of our site.
On the organic traffic report from analytics you can clearly see the when the troubles with analytics started & ended (artificial low bounce rate) - and that the traffic drop starts right after the reporting issue ended. Webmastertools also indicated a lower number of views/clicks, but not to the massive 50% drop.
Is it possible that Google uses the measurements from Analytics for it's SERP's? Or should there be another reason, and where should we start looking? Appreciate your help!
-
To be honest - I knew the media agency did a change - so I thought the script was removed. Checking the source again shows that they still have the tracking tag - but with a modified tracking code - the modified script is here http://bit.ly/1qmtdWg - our site is http://bit.ly/1D0weRQ
I don't see interference on the measurements, but if I look at the Google Analytics reference, I'm not sure if this is the proper way to implement two tracking codes on a page, but I am in not really an expert in javascript or advanced analytics configuraton.
-
Pageviews will double and bounce rates will drop any time you have two tracking codes on a page (each pageview is seen as two, thus automatically making it not a bounce). Did you just remove the extra Analytics tag, or get rid of the whole script?
-
It was a script from the company which is selling the ads on the site (a medium sized media agency in Germany). It included a Google Analytics tag from another account - which was called during the loading of the page. Not sure if it was the script itself, or the way it was called, but there certainly was interference. I noticed using the Analytics tag assistant that the tag which was used was not ours, and when the page was loaded it first became green (our tag), than blue, and then green again (external tag).
Direct result of the script was that time on page dropped dramatically, but pageviews/visit doubled & bouncerate was cut in half.
-
It doesn't look like a coincidence to me either; I just don't think it is a direct correlation of the increased bounce rate and the decreased traffic. What was that external script that added the extra Analytics code?
-
The (search) traffic didn't increase when the problem with analytics started (of course the page views did) - as you can see in the graph. There is a drop the moment the stats (bounce rate & page views/visit) change in the negative sense.
Quite possible it's a coincidence, and that something else is causing the drop, but I don't really see what it could be.
-
I would think that if one could substantially increase the traffic of a site by artificially decreasing bounce/increasing pageviews using a second code, we'd see a lot of double-tagged sites out there...
-
Always possible - however we never did any linkbuilding, and we never used external SEO agencies that could have done it. The link profile seems pretty normal, no links from spammy domains like blogger, blogspot, or other fishy domains.
The profile is quite comparable with similar sites within our company, and we don't see any changes at this date on any of the other sites.
-
It's probably more correlated with the Penguin 3.0 refresh that have been rolling out. I'm guessing that it's just a coincidence w/the GA issue.
-
Thanks - will check the weblogs as well.
I know that the normally there should not be a link between Analytics & SERP's - but it's the second time that I notice that a glitch in Analytics is linked to a sudden drop in traffic so I am getting a bit suspicious about it (the previous time was on another site 2 years ago)
-
According to Matt Cutts, the use of GA doesn't hurt/help your site in rankings. Do you have access to your web logs? If so, do an analysis there and see if it replicates what you saw on GA.
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
-
Universal Analytics Ecommerce data
Hi there, I have started to use Universal Analytics on my ecommerce site. I have implemented the code using Google Tag Manager. I don't see any ecommerce data on Universal Google Analytics under Conversions/Ecommerce. Can you please point me to the right direction? Also, can you please send me the best article on this topic? I want to know the bit of code that I have to add and all that UA can provide to get the most of my data for my ecommerce store. Thanks and regards
Reporting & Analytics | | footd0 -
Adwords start Organic traffic SIGNIFICANTLY drops
I hope someone can give me some insight here, or at least point me in the right direction. As of September 1 we are running Adwords. We are seeing an alarming drop in our organic traffic since then. It's almost like Adwords is cannibalizing organic. August/September Paid 116/847 Organic 648/178 We've looked at why the Organic could have dropped (penalties, site function issues, etc.) and have found nothing unusual. Can someone give me a reason why this might be happening, Why such a dramatic decrease just as adwords is started. Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | Britewave0 -
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 -
Goals in analytics
How do you establish which keywords generated traffic that resulted in goal completions (in GA) ? I thought this would be Reverse Goal Paths but this only goes back as far as the original page. Goal Flow shows the traffic source which is better but not the kw used ? Cheers Dan
Reporting & Analytics | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
Is Google analytics not working properly anymore?
Hi mozzers, We launched a website 2 months ago and when monitoring Organic data on GA we had an average of 23% bounce rate like a month ago but the last 2 weeks I noticed that bounce rate=0%. This is very weird especially that we haven't modified the existing pages and that multiple keywords show an average site duration of 0 seconds. Any thoughts about this discrepancy? Do you think that there is an issue with the GATC implemented? Thanks
Reporting & Analytics | | Ideas-Money-Art0 -
Excluding referral traffic from a specific page Google analytics
Hi, I am trying to exclude from referrals from a particular page i.e. www.domain.com/nothispage within Google analytics, I have tried a couple variations within the advanced filter (Regex etc) section without much luck, could anyone assist ? Updated-trying to do this using a filter for the entire profile. Thanks Marc
Reporting & Analytics | | NRMA0 -
How to filter pages in Analytics by multiple criteria
Hello, we have several pages with the same page title. Now out of all those pages I want to pick two. Let's call them "/page1" and "/page2". For those pages I want the following information (combined for both): Avg. time on page, Bounce rate, Navigation Summary Normally I get all the information under "Content" "Pages" and by choosing the "page title" as primary dimension and clicking on the respective page title. Let's call it "page | title". Choosing the filter for 1 page works fine (I just enter "/page1" in simple filter). But how can I filter for two pages ( entering " include page ends with /page1 and include page ends with /page2" in the advance filter will show 0 results). Thanks in advance
Reporting & Analytics | | guitarslinger0 -
Analytics goal funnel regular expression not working
Hi Guys can anyone point me in the right direction. My funnels used to work fine until our app team decided to add variables in a directory structure instead of a query string. I need to be able to track page steps that now look like this Step 1 = /Reservation/Search/Var1/Var2
Reporting & Analytics | | apolloseo
Step 2 = /Reservation/Quote/Var1/Var2 I've set up this but it's not working Step 1 = /Reservation/Search.*
Step 2 = /Reservation/Quote.* What am I doing wrong?0