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
-
Organic Traffic Spike
I've been chipping away at the SEO for a client's site for about 6 weeks and a few days ago noticed a huge spike in organic traffic for about a dozen keywords. See attached. Previously traffic was around 20-30 unique new visitors a day. On the 17 it went up to 500+ for 1 day, now it's come back down again. This spike was not for 1 keyword but for about a dozen. I've never seen this before and wondered if anyone had experienced similar. The site is about 3 months old. ebix3rl
Reporting & Analytics | | deployseo0 -
Organic Traffic Drop and Rank Increase After Video Thumbnail added
So my company has created a large amount of videos and I took a couple of them and created a test video sitemap to see what effect adding a video thumbnail/rich snippet to the SERPs would be. It worked on one page and gained 2 spots (position 6 to 4) for the highest keyword, but traffic didn't increase too much. Then a week later I tested it with the page that we get the most organic traffic for, which is ranking for a very big keyword. It worked and gained a bit of ranking, but traffic decreased 50% ever since according to Google Analytics. It seems to me that the traffic from users clicking on the video thumbnail is not be tracked as google / organic even though it lands them on the intended page/doesn't redirect anywhere else. I've looked to see if traffic to this page increased overall to see if it was being tracked via a referral or as something else, but couldn't find any traffic discrepancy. The only thing I did find is that impressions under SEO > Landing Pages > Video Property increased, but this could be from the page ranking in the Video SERPs now. Has anyone experienced a similar situation? Do you think having a video snippet could be that big of a turn off for customers that people just aren't clicking like they used to? I don't think so, that's why I'm leaning towards a tracking discrepancy in Google Analytics.
Reporting & Analytics | | OfficeFurn0 -
Direct traffic decline
I've noticed a few of our sites (tour, hotel, and local attraction) which are very established and reasonably high brand recognition that have experienced a significant decrease in branded traffic (-20-30% compared to same period from the previous year) the past few months. There have been no changes in offline marketing though we are seeing a slight decrease in visitor arrivals (-5%) and higher hotel room rates. Is there a chance that Google's not set may be affecting direct traffic numbers? Any other thoughts on how we can figure out why brand traffic is dipping? Thanks
Reporting & Analytics | | SoulSurfer80 -
Having Issue with Site Search in Analytics
Hi Mozzers, We launched a website in October 2012 and have added in the settings(Google analytics) of that profile "Do Track Site Search" since we have a search box on the website. The site search report worked for 10 days and it was over(from end of december till beginning of January 2013). Since then I have been trying to understand this issue. I have added all the query search terms possible, but still not showing any signs of life. At this point I am not sure what to do? Some Help would be appreciated! Search URL= subdomain.example.com**/search/node/**.... Thanks! z93cGUZ.png
Reporting & Analytics | | Ideas-Money-Art0 -
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 -
Google Analytics - Referral Traffic Question
How Google Analytics determine that some particular web site referred traffic if there is no back link on that site?
Reporting & Analytics | | DiamondJewelryEmpire1 -
Tracking PDF Downloads in Google Analytics
Hi, I work on a site that allows users to download whitepapers after filling out a form. Once they do this they are redirected to a URL which is the PDF. We use Wordpress and these documents were uploaded to the media center. I've tried researching how to track these downloads in GA, since the code is not present on these pages, but have read a few different answers. Anyone have firsthand experience? Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | tinarose0 -
Looking for a Google Analytics expert
Looking to hire a Google Analytics expert for a project. Dealing with trying to track traffic across multiple domains and then work with the Ecommerce options. Contact Jeff Logan @ Avelient with costs and time frame for work. [personal information removed by editors. please contact via private message system to exchange information]
Reporting & Analytics | | Avelient0