Traffic drop after analytics troubles
-
Hi
For two weeks we had an artifical low bouncerate & high pageviews/visit in our Analytics reporting. The day we corrected the bug in Analytics - our bouncerate & pageviews/visit returned to normal levels - however we saw our search traffic go down massively(-50% in sessions).
The bug in the Analytics was caused by a second Analytics tag which was included in an external script which interfered with our own tag. The drop in traffic occurred just after the removal of the second script (which was only on our site for two weeks). We didn't touch our own tagging - and there were no technical changes on the site during this period, and there is no seasonal trend which could explain the sudden drop of traffic. We double checked our tagging - and the analytics tag is present & working on all the pages of our site.
On the organic traffic report from analytics you can clearly see the when the troubles with analytics started & ended (artificial low bounce rate) - and that the traffic drop starts right after the reporting issue ended. Webmastertools also indicated a lower number of views/clicks, but not to the massive 50% drop.
Is it possible that Google uses the measurements from Analytics for it's SERP's? Or should there be another reason, and where should we start looking? Appreciate your help!
-
To be honest - I knew the media agency did a change - so I thought the script was removed. Checking the source again shows that they still have the tracking tag - but with a modified tracking code - the modified script is here http://bit.ly/1qmtdWg - our site is http://bit.ly/1D0weRQ
I don't see interference on the measurements, but if I look at the Google Analytics reference, I'm not sure if this is the proper way to implement two tracking codes on a page, but I am in not really an expert in javascript or advanced analytics configuraton.
-
Pageviews will double and bounce rates will drop any time you have two tracking codes on a page (each pageview is seen as two, thus automatically making it not a bounce). Did you just remove the extra Analytics tag, or get rid of the whole script?
-
It was a script from the company which is selling the ads on the site (a medium sized media agency in Germany). It included a Google Analytics tag from another account - which was called during the loading of the page. Not sure if it was the script itself, or the way it was called, but there certainly was interference. I noticed using the Analytics tag assistant that the tag which was used was not ours, and when the page was loaded it first became green (our tag), than blue, and then green again (external tag).
Direct result of the script was that time on page dropped dramatically, but pageviews/visit doubled & bouncerate was cut in half.
-
It doesn't look like a coincidence to me either; I just don't think it is a direct correlation of the increased bounce rate and the decreased traffic. What was that external script that added the extra Analytics code?
-
The (search) traffic didn't increase when the problem with analytics started (of course the page views did) - as you can see in the graph. There is a drop the moment the stats (bounce rate & page views/visit) change in the negative sense.
Quite possible it's a coincidence, and that something else is causing the drop, but I don't really see what it could be.
-
I would think that if one could substantially increase the traffic of a site by artificially decreasing bounce/increasing pageviews using a second code, we'd see a lot of double-tagged sites out there...
-
Always possible - however we never did any linkbuilding, and we never used external SEO agencies that could have done it. The link profile seems pretty normal, no links from spammy domains like blogger, blogspot, or other fishy domains.
The profile is quite comparable with similar sites within our company, and we don't see any changes at this date on any of the other sites.
-
It's probably more correlated with the Penguin 3.0 refresh that have been rolling out. I'm guessing that it's just a coincidence w/the GA issue.
-
Thanks - will check the weblogs as well.
I know that the normally there should not be a link between Analytics & SERP's - but it's the second time that I notice that a glitch in Analytics is linked to a sudden drop in traffic so I am getting a bit suspicious about it (the previous time was on another site 2 years ago)
-
According to Matt Cutts, the use of GA doesn't hurt/help your site in rankings. Do you have access to your web logs? If so, do an analysis there and see if it replicates what you saw on GA.
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
-
Increase in Direct Traffic plus Bounce Rate rise for all traffic sources
Hello, I work for an agency and we have seen a big rise in bounce rate for 4 of our clients which happened on the exact same day. This rise on bounce rate is across all traffic sources. We are also seeing a big increase in direct traffic, starting on the same day. Is it possible for bot traffic to affect the bounce rate of all other traffic sources? We have ruled out double reporting in GA but can explain how the bounce rate has increased for all traffic sources. How is this linked to the rise in direct traffic (in some cases as high as 500%)? Thanks
Reporting & Analytics | | jenallen0 -
Google Analytics - Dashboard Question
I'm looking to set up a dashboard widget in Google Analytics that does the following but can't : Shows traffic sources in a table as the dimension, and wanting to show goal completions to a specific product page and then only show what the average time spent (by source) on just those product pages. It looks like it's showing the whole session duration for the entire source, but I want to create a secondary filter that is only showing the time spent on those specific pages. Can anyone help - or is this possible? Thanks all!
Reporting & Analytics | | ReunionMarketing0 -
.com site referral traffic to ccTLDs
We have 7 international domains set up along with our main .com site. All of the ccTLds are showing their main referral traffic as coming from the .com site in GA, and most of those being from mobile. Each site is set up correctly with geo-targeting and hreflang tags. Has anyone experienced this before?
Reporting & Analytics | | ggpaul5620 -
Conflicting numbers in Google Analytics
I am getting 2 completely different numbers in Google Analytics.According to the graph on my Dashboard organic traffic decreased ~40% comparing June 7 -> June 6.However, when I dig a bit deeper and look at the 2 dates specifically compared to each other I get a `3% increase in traffic.When I look at the traffic on just June 7, I get the number indicating the increase.Any ideas or someone getting similar conflicting numbers??
Reporting & Analytics | | theLotter0 -
Google Analytics
Is there any way around being able to set up 20 goals in Analytics? What if one of my clients want to set up 10 pages with separate actions to track on each page. Will then each actions count as a separate goal? If this is the case, how could I work around creating more than 20 goals? Would I have to look into hiring/buying a third party or separate software? Your help is greatly appreciated.
Reporting & Analytics | | flcity150 -
Google Analytics Not Tracking 100% of Visits?
Hi all, We're having an issue with Analytics where we are getting different figures from what Silver Pop are saying. For example email campaign A sent via Silver Pop, with Google Analytics tracking code show's 50 unique clicks in Silver Pop. Looking at Google Analytics there are only 10 visits from that campaign. So I thought it could be something with the tracking, but there wasn't a significant rise in web visits = either Google Analytics is not recording visits properly or Silver Pop figures are wrong. I'm more inclined to think that it's something to do with Google Analytics. Has anyone come across something similar? Where one system is showing you X amount of visits but the figures on Google Analytics don't add up? A few quick things already covered: Double checked the links have been tracked properly, but this doesn't explain the low increase in web visits generally We've double checked that Google Analytics tracking code is properly installed (and it is / was at the time of send). Any help would be much appreciated! Thanks guys.
Reporting & Analytics | | RKHStaff1 -
Google analytics - help
Hello, What is meant by campaign expiration in Google analytics ? The default value is 6 months. what does it mean ?
Reporting & Analytics | | seoug_20050 -
What analytics program is best for a small business?
Of course Google analytics is good. I tried getclicky.com. Are there any other analytics programs that are better that are also affordable? What do you use?
Reporting & Analytics | | DallasBonsai0