My direct traffic went up and my organic traffic went down. Help!
-
So on Oct. 21, our direct traffic increased 3x and our organic traffic decreased 3x. And it has been that way ever since. Almost like they flip flopped. Additionally, that was the same day I started retargeting to our site. I have tagged all the links from the ads and they're being counted as google paid clicks in GA. And our accounts are linked. I am just dumbfounded as to how this could happen.
-
Hey Arnold Ambiel,
cheguei a esse tópico porque estava tendo um problema como o seu. O tráfego orgânico e direto foram revertidos. Vi que você tinha esse problema em 2016 e o meu ocorreu em junho.
Você encontrou alguma solução para esse problema? -
haven't checked yet but did find this article about serp sitelink changes on the exact day i saw traffic drop.
-
Awh, shucks! Thanks for the kind words!
I look forward to seeing what you find! Let me know if I can help any further!
Regards,
Trenton -
It's contributions like Trenton's above that make me love the Moz community. I will check all that you suggested and report back.
-
I'm going to chime in here as the conversation has already started from which I want to reference a few items.
While Sean is correct that there is a redirect on page load, - which is weird & not likely optimal - the redirect isn't causing the UTM parameters to be dropped here.
If you check the Network tab of the debug console of Chrome you'll see the two requests for the URI you listed above. If you click the requested file (in the network tab) & navigate to the 'Headers' tab you will see that Query String Parameters are still there & being passed.
Now let's circle back to the original problem & see if we can't get to the bottom of it!I checked out the graph you linked and while it does seem that there's an inverse correlation there, I wouldn't assume too quickly that they switched. I would encourage you to dive into the data a little bit more. Specifically:
-
I would use Google Search Console's Search Analytics (the actual interface, not the section in Google Analytics) & look to see if the number of clicks around that same time changed much.
-
If there is a noticeable change, dive into the keywords & Landing Pages that saw the shift
-
If there is not a noticeable change, we can cross an actual organic change off our list.
-
I would also look at the change over that period in GA's landing page report. Look to see if there are any pages that saw a gain/loss over the period in question.
-
If there is, add a secondary dimension of medium & see where the change lies
-
If not, mark it off
-
The final door I would check is the changes that were made for remarketing
-
What if any changes were made within Google Analytics? Specifically the admin portion, while I'd check all changes you may have made here, I'm specifically curious if you may have added the URL Query Parameters as exclusions?
-
Were any tags, tracking codes, etc added during this time & are the implementations correct?
If you dive into these and summarize your findings here, I'll be more than happy to help you further. Though, I have a hunch that the answer is behind one of these doors.
Good luck!
Trenton -
-
thought i'd add the GA graph that shows the switch
-
so would a JS redirect make the session count as direct traffic?
-
Hey,
It looks like there was a JS redirect in place that redirects users to a fresh page view of the same page - don't know if this might be something having an effect?
I used Ayima Redirect Tool for chrome to find this - see the screenshot attached.
Hope this helps,
Sean
-
Thanks Sean!
Here is the final URL:
http://www.oneworldplayproject.com/buy-bulk-soccer-balls/?utm_medium=cpc&utm_source=google&utm_campaign=bulk&utm_content=bulk10&utm_term=300Here is the URL in the ad that people could type in. This is a redirect to the www. version:
oneworldplayproject.comAlso, these are only image ads so there is no display URL being shown.
I am also curious why Organic would drop though. But let's play this out first.
-
Hi there,
Although you say you've tagged your ad traffic correctly, it sounds like your UTM tracking isn't set up correctly - 95% of the time wrong tracking from ads forces a sudden unnatural increase in Direct traffic. The other possibility is that you're sending traffic to a page that's then redirecting to your site which may trim off the UTM tagging and force the traffic as 'Direct'.
Give me an example of one of the URLs you've tagged up and I'll see if anything is going wrong.
All the best,
Sean
-
direct traffic can be from bookmarks and such, as well as it could depend on proper implementation of ads and retargetting too.
That does seem a bit odd of a coincidence though, I have never dealt with such a switch scenario like that and to that degree, I have only seen more negligible or at least less worrisome amount of such changes in the past which we ended up not spending time to find out what was the underlying sitch with it as it corrected itself as a trend after a short period of time.
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
-
Website Not Ranking Organically - Not Links, Not Domain Authority...
This is regarding the domain: http://lesliekays.com We got a new client about 5 months back who had a website that was hacked. It took several months, but we've cleaned up most of the spammy links and completely rebuilt their website. We have been successful with every other client that we have ever done getting our customers to rank well organically, but we just can't figure this one out. I'm willing to offer a REWARD to the single person who can figure this out for us. (Let's not get carried away, a small reward). This customer has great quality links to their site too. We are looking for answers other than: 1. Backlinks 2. Content 3. Malware 4. Domain or Page authority 5. 404 errors 6. We have utilized Googles Webmaster tools endlessly It is something else and we can not identify it! Let me know what you think! I will give a public shout out to the person who helps us identify this issue!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Tosten0 -
Why is my Bing traffic dropping?
In the middle of September we launched a redesigned version of our site. The urls all stayed the same. Since site launch traffic in Google has steadily increased but Bing traffic has dropped by about 50%. Any ideas on what I should look at?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EcommerceSite0 -
Traffic and keyword drop
Hello, On one of the sites that I manage - http://www.zalikihotel.gr/ , there was a significant decrease in keyword positions over the last 10-15 days. Sample screenshot is attached. Some of the keywords even dropped for 17-18 positions. From the end of April, organic traffic dropped by 30 percent. Website is mobile optimized, so that shouldn't be a problem. In the last 3-4 months, we had traffic increase. Domain authority went up by 3 points after the last index. On-site SEO was completed, and currently I'm focusing on link-building and working on bringing back to life forgotten social media. Does anybody knows what might be the case for this negative affects on our site? Do you think it's a temporary fluctuation or not? Thanks in advance. 8dSBELm.png?1
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | socrateskirtsios0 -
Canonicals for product pages - confused, anyone help?
I have an ecommerce website (built using Magento), and have just had the functionality extended to allow me to define my own canonical URLs. Currently the URLs are www. domainname.com/product-name.html but I can now change this to www.domainname. com/product-category/product-name.html. I was led to believe that this would be good for SEO. However, I have since had conflicting advice - it's been suggested that any links across the website that link to domain/category/sub-category/product will pass weight and authority through to the specified canonical anyway. Plus longer URLs are generally worse... I'm confused. Is it worth changing them? If so, would it be a bad thing to change all 700 canonical URLs at once?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Coraltoes770 -
Help - Lost Ranking - What did I screw up?!
Hi, We're working with a local service provider with a location specific keyword (not a real example: "orlando plumbing contractors"). Background:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AaronHenry
In recent history the client updated a new site design and upgraded from Joomla 1.5 to Joomla 2.5. Of course there were duplicate content issues which have been resolved with the help of AceSEF. Duplicate content, title tags, and other content issues are handled as soon as they appear in GWT or MOZ. Additionally, a high number of backlinks were lost when the latest Google update hit. Many of these sites were of sites that no longer existed or were spammy and flushed out. Some were lost due to the previous SEO firm literally removing backlinks and switching them to their new client (seo firm was putting all of the work the client paid for under their name to control everything). Current Situation: The backlink loss seems to have been stopped (hopefully) because we are using a new strategy that relies solely on the quality of the links, surrounding text, varied anchor text, relevancy, etc.) However, we tried an experiment on just one of the clients keywords. That experiment seems to have blown up in our faces evidently. The landing page for the location specific keyword has dropped from the index completely (it seems), but only when searching broad. When using exact match with quotes like the example quoted above ("orlando plumbing contractors") the landing page appears, but several ranks lower. We were ranked yesterday 6/23/13, but as of today 6/24/13 are no longer ranked. On broad matches, non-relevant sites and even a site that shows only a broken server configuration is outranking the client (they appear for the broad search, but the client does not). What Was Done
We recently created a press release for and posted it on a press release site. We then created a link back to the landing page (exact match anchor text). We posted the PR article to several social sites (Google plus, folkd, delicious, twitter, stumble upon, diigo). We also created a blog article (on-site) on site for that, creating links back to the landing page (the links all had exact anchor text). We posted that blog article to social news sites (facebook, stumble, delicious) and included a ping. The PR article was manually rewritten and posted to the PR site (we had to make 2 versions of the PR; one for the blog and one for the PR site). The Result
The client ending up dropping off the broad search rankings, but only slipped a few for "exact match" (with quotes). The PR article that was created is now ranked on page 3 for the board keyword and is still beat by non working sites. We suspect that the exact anchor text could be causing this problem. Anyone else have an idea (we're scratching our heads and trying not to freak out at the same time).0 -
Home Page Got Indexed as httpS and Rankings Went Down.
Hello fellow SEO's About 3 weeks ago all of a sudden the home page on our Magento based website went down in rankings (from top 10 to page 3-4 Google) and was showing as httpS - instead of usual http. It first happened with just a few keywords and a week later any search phrase was returning the httpS result for the home page. When I view cache for the home page now it (both http and httpS versions) it gives me this http://clip2net.com/s/2OtPS We are not blocking anything in robots.txt Robots tags are set to index,follow There are hardly any external links pointing at the home pages as httpS This only affected the home page - all other pages rank where they used to and appear as http Has anybody ever had a similar problem? Thanks in advance for your thoughts and help
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ddseo0 -
Incorrect country listed in Google organic listing.
Hi, I have a client called 'Ivana Daniell'. She is a Pilates/ Movement Therapy/ Postural Assessment practitioner based in London. She has been based in the UK since 2011. Prior to that her studio was in Singapore. Her website URL is: http://www.ivanadaniell.com If you Google her using the UK engine (www.google.co.uk) using the term 'London Pilates' she comes up in the top four, but her organic listing appears with a small tag which reads "- singapore". I have attached an image of how it appears. This makes many searchers overlook her, believing that she is based overseas. We host her website here in the UK and have removed any reference to Singapore from the website. We have even put an h card on her site to indicate that she is London based. The client believes that this might be the result of an old Google places account of hers, from her time in Singapore. However I have not been able to find any such listing by searching for it in Google and, because it was allegedly set up by her former marketing manager, she does not have her username or password to the account. She has lost touch with the marketing manager and has no way to get the login details. To reiterate however I have seen no proof to suggest that this listing even exists. So, the question! 1. What could be causing the word 'singapore' to be appearing next to the organic listing? 2. If it is the result of an inaccurate Google Places listing, how do I delete this listing without either the username or password? 3. If this is not what is causing 'singapore' to appear by the organic listing, how do I get rid of the 'singapore' word? Thanks very much and Happy New Year mozzers! Edward M6Wyd M6Wyd
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GoUp0 -
Help diagnosing a complex SEO issue
Good evening SEOMoz. A series events, in close succession are making it somewhat difficult for me to diagnose a cause of fluctuations in traffic. Please excuse some of the stupid moves I made, but desperation got the better of me. One of my most beloved websites was hit by Panda on January 18th. Pretty sure it was due to a CMS bug that is now fixed. The website site started to show great signs of recovery from April 19th - Panda 3.5. I'm going to be as explicit as possible with the traffic for the days that follow. Traffic was stable previously. April 20th +10%. April 21st +5%. April 22nd +5%. (half way recovered, also the first real fluctuation since the site was hit in Jan). Due to the looming over-optimisation penalty, on the 22nd I changed the titles to unoptimise them a little. (fear is a dangerous thing at times). April 23rd -10%. April 24th -10% April 25th onwards, pretty much levelled out. The websites I've seen hit by Penguin, lost around 40% of their traffic, very steeply on 24th and 25th April. So the drops aren't in keeping with my experience of Penguin. But they do coincide perfectly with the massive site-wide title change. I've haven't read anything definitive about a penalty for changing titles too often, but for obvious reasons, it makes sense. The drop seems terribly soon after changing titles, but the site is very heavily indexed. It's also worth mentioning that I did changed the titles BACK, incase it was purely the fact the titles had been slightly de-optimised, that caused the drop. I waited until May 5th. This had no positive nor negative effect. It's a lot to take in but I'd love to hear your thoughts. I'm feeling a little bamboozled looking at all the figures. There was of course the above the fold update on the 19th Jan, but lets ignore that as we've only ever had a max 1 ad per page, most pages have none.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seo-wanna-bs0