Drop in direct traffic & spike in Adwords, any relation?
-
So I noticed a significant (around 50%) drop in Direct traffic in analytics to one of my websites (compared to last month). I've also noticed a spike in Adwords for around the same number of sessions. The drop in traffic is pretty much isolated to one specific page, and it is the same page involved in the spike in Adwords.
Is it possible that Google was not recognizing a portion of the Adwords traffic? That's the only theory I have, but we haven't changed anything with their tracking or Adwords, so I'm a little hesitant to go with that theory.
-
If it's for the same page, and you're seeing the inverse relationship, then it is very probable that adwords has replaced your mobile organic listing. I would double check your search query report and negative keywords and mobile bids to ensure that google hasn't just started associating your pages to different keywords.
-
That particular website doesn't rank for any major terms, so I don't think it's got anything to do with organic rank...
The UA code looks correct on the page....is there any else that would cause it to track improperly? Absolutely nothing has been changed on the site or in the adwords campaign...I just don't know what would cause it to suddenly change the way it's tracking =/
update: I looked a little deeper into analytics and it looks like they actually are down by around 23% for returning visits (although not specifically isolated to the adwords page). They're also down by about 22% for mobile, compared to almost no change for desktop. The mobile drop is primarily associated with the adwords page.
Offline, we've actually increased billboard/poster advertising, so it wouldn't make sense for direct traffic to drop there either.
This is frustrating, I think it has something to do with mobile/adwords tracking, but I can't find anything out of the ordinary =/
-
I'd look at tracking/reporting on your end - sounds like you've got direct reporting as AdWords.
-
What keywords are you bidding on? It could be that you are ranking for the same phrase in both paid and organic and people are just clicking on your PPC ad rather than your organic listing.
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
-
I have had a huge increase in direct traffic to our website but not sure why this suddenly happened? (no promos during this time period)
I have had a huge increase in direct traffic to our website but not sure why this suddenly happened? (no promos during this time period), traffic up 200%+ according to Google Analytics
Reporting & Analytics | | Julia_a1a1 -
Big drop in organic traffic after moving the website-should we still do 301 redirects?
Hi,
Reporting & Analytics | | martin1970
We have a website that got redesigned with new urls in Jan 31, 2018. Since then our SEO traffic has gone down big time and to never recover. We did not do any 301 redirects back then (very stupid I know but I was not in charge then). So my question is would it be beneficial to 301 redirect old urls that were once ranked but now have all 404 errors or is it too late to do these 301 to gain any benefits? If a page that was once ranked and then have a 404 error, how long does google keep that 404 page in their database? I have heard information saying that although the page is a 404 it may still be indexed in their backend for some time and then it completely drops off all together. If so do you know how long time they would keep those 404 in their database? The old urls may have had good backlinks pointed to them because the organic traffic was good back then. So I wonder if doing 301 right now would help send some link juice over to the new urls? Or would this be a complete waste of time? Cheers Martin1 -
Why is Indeed.com traffic appearing as organic in Google Analytics?
A large number of sessions in my client's Google Analytics account appear to come from medium: organic and source:Indeed. Since I'm focused on SEO for this project, I'd prefer that Indeed be treated as referral traffic. Any ideas for fixing this issue? Also, and I'm sure the answer is no, is there a way to fix the past data in Google Analytics that has already reported Indeed as an organic medium?
Reporting & Analytics | | Kevin_P0 -
How to stop Spam Referral Traffic?
We get referral traffic from Spammers to our Wordpress sites. That traffic comes from different countries: Russia, Ukraine, India, Germany, Pakistan etc. What's the best way to get rid of it? Setting up filters in Google Analytics? Is there something else that I need to do? Is there a plug-in that could help? Does that traffic have a negative impact on my SEO? Does it affect the rankings?
Reporting & Analytics | | Armen-SEO2 -
How can we view traffic from specific Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Reddit accounts in Google Analytics?
Dear Moz Community, This is a Google Analytics question. Using Google Analytics, we're trying to identify trends of visitors on a website from specific social media accounts, i.e: twitter.com/account-x facebook.com/account-x youtube.com/account-x reddit.com/r/account-x Ideally, we would like to be able to see the success rate for specific posts on these social media accounts, and how users engaged on the website after arriving from clicking a link on one of these accounts. Is this drill-down feature currently possible in Google Analytics? Many thanks for helping!
Reporting & Analytics | | BoomDialogue690 -
SEO traffic had significantly dropped
I know this question has been asked before, but I'm hoping someone can address my specific issue. We recently did a complete redesign of our site and moved it over to a new server. The site was even "down" for about a week, where we had a static splash page. However since relaunching (it's not been over two weeks) we've seen a significant drop in search engine traffic. We are using Yoast for Wordpress. The site is The Tech Block. Could anyone see if there is something we're doing wrong? Thanks
Reporting & Analytics | | ttb0 -
How to see traffic for specific keywords in GA
Hell guys, What i want to achieve is to generate a list of specific keywords showing traffic for a certain periode of time. I also want so be able to compare this time period with historical data. I want a list as shown in: Traffic sources -> sources -> search -> organic. This shows a list of keywords generating traffic out of the organic search results. When you use a filter you can only use one word so it seems. I just want to create that list but with the specific keywords i choose to display. I tried advanced reports and advanced segments but that doesn't really give me what i want. The idea behind this whole thing is that i want to give my client an overview of the traffic received on the words we are optimizing for. this traffic has to be compared to the previous month so they can see clearly if there were changes. Thx !
Reporting & Analytics | | 5MMedia0 -
Can you get local search numbers/traffic out of Google Analytics?
With Google's new local search I am more curious as to market penetration on keywords that are now localized to my different US cities. I understand that you can separate out Google traffic based on regional Google domains, but I am curious if there is an effective way to separate out searches and keywords based on a my local US Metros? If google cannot do this, any recommendations on products that can? Thanks.
Reporting & Analytics | | Thos0031