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
-
Does anyone have a good resource for seeing SERP feature/presentation change Year-Over-Year?
Moz only tracks general SERP feature changes for the last 30 days.
Reporting & Analytics | | homedepot0 -
Tracking time spent on a section of a website in Google Analytics
Hi, I've been asked by a client to track time spent or number of pages visited on a specific section of their website using Google Analytics but can't see how to do this. For example, they have a "golf" section within their site and want to measure how many people either visit 5 page or more within the golf section or spend at least 6 minutes browsing the various golf section pages. Can anyone advise how if this can be done, and if so, how I go about it. Thanks
Reporting & Analytics | | geckonm0 -
Referral Traffic Issue
I'm working on a site that has low traffic volumes due to its niche. That's fine but we are daily getting referral traffic from unrelated domains without a link. These visits are always 100% bounce which is impacting the overall click.through rate. The domains are not the same and different ones come through all the time, so it is difficult to keep on top of. Any ideas what could be going on here and an effective way of dealing with this?
Reporting & Analytics | | MickEdwards0 -
Changing URL Parameters in Webmaster Tools
We have a bit of a conundrum. Webmaster tools is telling us that they are crawling too many URLs: Googlebot found an extremely high number of URLs on your site: http://www.uncommongoods.com/ In their list of URL examples, all of the URLs have tons of parameters. We would probably be ok telling Google not to index any of the URLs with parameters. We have a great URL structure. All of our category and product pages have clean links (no parameters) The parameters come only from sorts and filters. We don't have a need for Google to index all of these pages. However, Google Analytics is showing us that over the last year, we received a substantial amount of search revenue from many of these URLs (800+ of them converted) So, Google is telling us they are unhappy. We want to make Google happy by ignoring all of the paramter URLs, but we're worried this will kill the revenue we're seeing. Two questions here: 1. What do we have to lose by keeping everything as-is. Google is giving us errors, but other than that what are the negative repercussions? 2. If we were to de-index all of the parameter URLs via Webmaster tools, how much of the revnenue would likely be recovered by our non-parameter URLs? I've linked to a screenshot from Google Analytics ArxMSMG.jpg
Reporting & Analytics | | znotes0 -
Why would our client's site be receiving significant levels of organic traffic for a keyword they do not rank for?
We have a client that has received 100+ organic visits for the keyword 'airport transfers', yet the site does not rank in the top 100 search results for this keyword. We have checked that it is not untagged PPC traffic. Truly baffling. Can anybody help?
Reporting & Analytics | | mrdavidingram0 -
Organic Traffic From...Mountain View, CA?
I've noticed something a little odd in my organic search traffic lately. Looking at several websites that target the Minneapolis area, I'm seeing some organic searches come in (typically using head keywords - no geo-modifier) from Mountain View, CA. There's no way we are truly ranking well on these terms in California, so it certainly feels like Google sniffing around. I was worried that perhaps they were checking into penalizing us or something, but we've actually seen upticks in search traffic lately. This traffic is not showing up in Google Analytics, just Adobe SiteCatalyst. In the past, spikes from random locations were probably some sort of crawler, like the preview bot, but these are coming in as searches with (for now) keyword data. Has anyone else seen anything like this?
Reporting & Analytics | | SarahLK0 -
Why do I have a lot of direct traffic from MSN and Yahoo with 100% bounce rate?
For MSN I have about 8000 hits of one page and a 100% bounce rate. In the last month I have about 400 hits from Yahoo with a 100% bounce rate. Msn is all different pages, while Yahoo is all the home page. What would cause this?
Reporting & Analytics | | EcommerceSite0