Huge Traffic Drop without any change on website
-
Hello there,
I've experienced a huge website traffic drop and I can't find a reason. I redesigned and updated the SEO strategy in early December and the traffic was increasing, that's why I have no idea why that is happening.
I have a video on home page and the views/day dropped a lot as well, but not as much as website visits!
Any inputs?
Best regards,
-
I have send my email in private message. Let me know if you got it.
-
Hello Dirk,
I was trying to collect as mush information as possible before answering. I couldn't private message you tho, I don't know why. I can PM any other user except you, could you please check your preferences?
The Webmaster Tools is closer to 2k, actually smaller. I always suspected the abrupt Direct access our website received and the huge number of mobile devices, now it's mainly desktop as it should be imo for our business.
Any alternative for me to send you our URL?
Best regards,
-
Hi Guilherme,
It seems highly unlikely that your traffic if it was 100k/day that it would consist only of robot visits. Are you absolutely sure that all the sections of your site are still measured by Analytics? I would suspect that you are currently only measuring one section of your site (based on session duration and number of pages I would almost guess that it would be something like a forum).
You say you did not see a difference in Webmaster tools. I don't know how much traffic you get from Google, but is the traffic you're getting in Webmaster tools closer to 2K clicks /day or to 100K clicks/day?
Did you check your statistics the day the drop occurred (set view to "hour") - was the drop very sudden (in one hour), or did it just disappear during the day?
Without more info it's difficult to help - could you sent your url in a private message so I could check if your analytics is ok?
rgds,
Dirk
-
Hello Dirk,
Thanks for the detailed answer. I waited until today to get the results from webmaster tool and there was not a drop in organic traffic. Also the number of users/registration to the website remain normal. The drop was from 100k/day to 2k/day, so have developed a theory.
Is it possible that most of my traffic was coming from searchbots/crawlers?
I noticed that some funny numbers:
page/session went from 1.68 to 4.56,
Session duration from 2:30 to 7:45
Bounce rate from 73% to 34%
Any insights about what these numbers mean?
Best regards,
-
I would just like to add that this could just be seasonality of your site, or events going on that generally affect search volume, like holidays or huge sporting events. Sometimes it isn't an issue with your site, but a general decrease in search volume.
-
Hi,
Sudden traffic drops could have 3 principal causes:
-
you're being hit by an algorithm update - when I check http://moz.com/google-algorithm-change I don't really see a change on the date your problem starts. You could check in analytics if the traffic drop in mainly coming from organic traffic, or if the drop is for all traffic sources. Check your webmastertools - see if search queries dropped drastically (with the 2 day delay in Webmastertools it's probably to soon to do that). Do you see a manual action in your webmastertools? Check google - use the queries where you used to get the traffic from - does your ranking still looks ok - or did your site disappear from the results? If not - check the next point:
-
there is a problem with your analytics tag - install the Analytics plugin in Chrome (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/page-analytics-by-google/fnbdnhhicmebfgdgglcdacdapkcihcoh) and check your most important pages - see if the Analytics tag is measuring data. Go to Analytics - take the day where the traffic drop started & compare with the previous day - take the view on an hourly basis. If the drop appears on a very specific timepoint - than probably there has been some modification on your site which had an impact on your measurements.
-
last - check if your robots.txt is not blocking access to your site - take your main pages and check if they can be fetched by Google (there is a tool in Webmastertools)
Hope this helps. In my experience, a very sharp drop on a very specific moment (change occurs in 1 hour) is mostly caused by a problem with the analytics tag.
rgds,
Dirk
-
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
-
Sudden drop in traffic since website redesign – can't spot double firing sessions pre-update
Hi all, We launched an updated website around mid-April and have seen a long-term drop in unique page views and sessions since then. Between 25-35%. Page views returned to normal within a month, however. In terms of acquisition, we've not lost referrals or direct traffic, just organic sessions. I haven't seen any significant Google updates except for 'Fred' but that was in March (pre-website update). We did have to do some 301s and fix up an HTML and XML sitemap, etc, post launch – but that's been in place for a while now so shouldn't still have such an effect? We are also struggling with load speed at the moment, working on this at the moment. Didn't think this had a such a significant impact on ranking however. We've lost mostly non-UK traffic, especially USA. We're actually climbing rankings for a lot of new keywords I'm targeting, so I can't see how our SEO has been hampered. Frustratingly, I wasn't using Search Console or Moz Pro before this update, so can't compare much in the way of keyword traffic (I know I feel very silly now). I don't know if it's a reporting issue (I wish it was). I mean we had both GTM and GA tags on the website (I didn't know this until I looked into it) but these were present post website-launch. And I haven't found enough double firing sessions or page views to suggest we used to be getting double figures anyway. Before this, we were ranking brilliantly and getting more organic traffic than ever. All the best,
Reporting & Analytics | | landport0 -
Whats (Other) traffic in Google Analytics?
When I look through all our clients, a few are receiving the majority of their traffic from (other). [ Acquisition > Channels > (Other) ]. The only option in (other) is "website" or "offline", whatever that may be. And even weirder, the avg session duration is 0:00. Any idea what this may be?
Reporting & Analytics | | W2GITeam0 -
Stripping referrer on website with a mix of both http and https
I know going from https to http (usually) strips referrers but I was wondering if the referrer is stripped when your website is a mix of both http and https? Say someone browses your site (on http), adds a product and then goes to your cart (https), then decides to go back to another page on your website which is http. Will this strip the referrer? Any help on this would be great, thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | Fitto0 -
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 -
Ideas for a strange surge in direct traffic
Being the type of person that can't stop checking my Google Analytics, I noticed this morning that between the hours of 12 and 2 central time last night I recieved a strange surge of direct traffic. My site typically gets around 40 direct visits per day (most of them coming during peak hours around the time people are getting off of work). I received 150 direct visits during this random time in the middle of the night. My bounce rate soared as almost every visit was a bounce. The visitors locations are spread out as if it is natural human traffic. Every single one of the visitors is using a chrome browser. Has anyone else run into something like this? All I can think of is that someone might have an addon or toolbar for chrome that linked to my site for a while in a way that caused unsuspecting visitors to end up on my page. For now I'm keeping my fingers crossed and hoping the traffic doesn't return, as it could be bad news for my Adsense. *Edit: Also of particular interest, each direct visit went to an internal page on my site and no two of the 150 visits went to the same internal page. I also added an image showing a normal complete day's direct traffic and my direct traffic for today so far (The bulk of the surge came yesterday but the shot from today illustrates the surge better because it is missing my naturally daily direct traffic that comes in the afternoon) heXFb#LiiEr
Reporting & Analytics | | pattersonla0 -
Is there a way to use Google Analytics event tracking for YouTube embedded videos on my website?
Hello! I am trying to track different types of interaction on the YouTube for videos which are embedded on a website to measure the interaction on these video from my organic traffic. Is there a good way to go about this with the code since these are coming from an iFrame on YouTube? Would appreciate any feedback or help on implementing the event tracking with YouTube videos. Many thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | CabbageTree0 -
Do links tagged with Analytics UTM parameters has the same significance as once without any parameters?
If we add UTM parameters to inbound links, for tracking specific referral behavior, will those link have the same SEO significance as links without parameters?
Reporting & Analytics | | Usearch0 -
Ideas Why Our Google News Traffic Disappearing?
The traffic to our major market newspaper website from Google News has dropped nearly 100% in the past ten days. Any ideas why might be happening?
Reporting & Analytics | | wlis990