Decreased organic traffic but increased Webmaster Tool Queries

[jfeitlinger]

We have a client who has had a significant decrease in organic traffic this last month (about 20%) but in Webmaster tools it tells me there was an increase in impressions and clicks.  How can these both be accurate?

[MoosaHemani]

There can be multiple reasons why this could have happened but before I start, I personally do not trust the data by search console and the main reason is because its delayed but I don’t think it can’t be that wrong that it will challenge the data provided in Google Analytics.

Here are some of the possibilities:

1. Check your analytics IP data (ignore traffic from…) There is a possibility that Analytics is ignoring some of the data as instructed whereas webmaster console is looking into every detail.
2. Very nice point by Matt. Maybe analytics data is not available on every page on the website and Search Console is tracking that traffic as well.

Also, make sure that you are looking in to the full traffic data in analytics and not just the search traffic only as search console will be tracking the data from search, referral, paid and more.

I believe a quick audit should point where the problem is!

Hope this helps!

[MattAntonino]

I can think of a few ways...

1. Did "organic" include traffic from another search engine that is now entirely gone? I ranked #1 for "domains" on Bing for a day or two. Guess what that did to my traffic? lol

2. Analytics may not be setup on all new pages. Traffic going to (for instance) blog posts that are posted to social and then picked up by Google but not yet crawled? I had a REALLY big client who had installed GA once but never followed up on all their (manually created) pages. This is why I love Wordpress and template CMS but hate everything else. You can run a Screaming Frog crawl that checks whether the GA code is on every page.

3. Was the GA code used on ANOTHER site and subsequently removed? WMT would only show you the one site. The same GA code can be posted to 10 sites. When 8 go down, your organic traffic would decrease but your WMT would stay the same.

I'm sure there are at least another 5 ways that this could happen. It would definitely require a bit more investigation but yes, both can happen at the same time.

[Eric_Rohrback]

How are you segmenting your analytics reports? It might be possible that you're excluding locations or devices? I also wouldn't trust Search Console data to be accurate. It's delayed, and only a sample of the true traffic the site is getting. Use it more for research/help on optimization rather than using it as true data for the website.