Spike then Drop in Direct Traffic?
-
We've been doing some SEO work over the last few weeks and earlier this week we saw a large spike in traffic. Yay we all thought, but then yesterday the traffic levels returned to pre-celebratory levels.
I've been doing some digging to try and find out what was different Monday and Tuesday this week. Mondays are usually big traffic days for us anyway, but this week was by far the biggest, and Tuesday was even higher still, our best day ever.
After some poking, I found that the direct traffic followed the same pattern as our overall traffic levels (image attached). The first spike coincides with an email we sent out that day, but the later spike we just don't know where it came from?
I understand loosely that direct isn't easily traceable, but can anyone help us understand more about this second spike?
Thanks!
-
You might want to check if you have spam in your reports, especially this referral free-social-buttons. This referral spam hits with direct visit along with the referral part.
The problem of this spam over others is that even if you filter the referral you will keep getting the fake direct visits, but luckily there is a solution, if you check the hostname that these direct visits use you will see that is not set or it's fake as any Ghost Spam in Google Analytic, so they way to stop this type of spam in any form(referral, keyword or direct) is to create a valid hostname filter that will only allow valid traffic. You can check full details of this issue in this article:
http://www.ohow.co/unusual-increase-in-direct-traffic-on-ga-spam/
-
Hi Kyle,
Thanks for responding.
We found it was from Miami after some digging around in Analytics and sorting by location.
No drop in traffic organically, just our usual organic combined with direct gives us a huge spike, but direct from Miami isn't much use for us!
-
I seem to have the same issue on my site. I get a sudden influx of visitors within minutes all coming from direct traffic. How did you discover the traffic was from Miami? The only identifying factor I could find in GA was that the Network Domain for the traffic was 1e100.net. Not sure how sending direct traffic would benefit a spammer.
Have you experienced an overall drop in traffic on days you get the huge spike in direct traffic? I feel like I do, maybe the high bounce rate is a problem and signal to Google?
Would be nice to block the traffic but possibly just filter it from GA to avoid skewed data if it is not affecting your site.
-
Ok, so I've been doing some digging and I've found the cause, just not the answer.
The additional traffic came in at 9am from Miami... Our website has nothing to do with Miami and 9am would be 3am local time.
It still doesn't look like anything spammy but still, where can I go from here to find the cause of Miami traffic coming to our site?
Thanks!
-
With it being over a week since your email was sent I don't think the two events are related, the pattern we see from our emails see an initial spike and a much smaller spike the Monday of the following week due to out of offices etc.
If your certain its direct traffic then I would be investigating further with analytics. The spike is at a time you normally experience spikes, is this coincidence or a pattern?
In our marketing department we try to paint a picture of our direct traffic users.
Which page are they landing on, what are they doing, where is the user located, are the visits resulting in more bookings/services being orders. Then consider external factors which may cause people to go looking more.
For example, one company I work with here in the UK see a jump in direct traffic correlating with the end of the financial year and tax refunds.
As SMG said, Behaviour and Acquisition tabs are your friend. Sorry its not more of an "answer" but direct traffic can be vague.
-
Thank you for your reply.
Apologies, here's some more info:
Our increase in traffic overall was much higher than normal, but in Analytics when we view just direct, this seems to be the cause of the additional traffic. Organic did not spike.
It is a website for a car dealership containing many brands. The website is fairly large, around 1,000 pages with another 1,000 used cars which are fed in every morning with updates (cars sold, new cars added etc).
Mondays are normally busy days as customers like to book test drives/services etc ready for the following weekend.
Thank you.
-
Harry, Could you provide a little more info/clarify a few things?
You stated that your direct traffic on the spike day followed the same overall pattern as a normal day etc... but you haven't clarified if the spike was all direct traffic.
Was this spike definitely direct traffic?
Also I think its beneficial for us to know (so we can look at factors that might influence direct traffic)
What Industry / Type of website is it?
Why are Mondays normally big traffic days? -
Thanks for your reply Jimmy.
We didn't send any emails out on our second spike, which is why we're confused.
The landing pages don't look any different from what we'd expect day-to-day - Nothing that really stands out.
Thanks
-
Hi there,
To get a better idea of your traffic you really need to dig into the Acquisition and Behaviour tabs in Google Analytics.
If you are saying it was a mystery spike in direct traffic, have you checked what the landing pages are? Google translates and the web archive can appear in direct traffic, but are distinguishable from their landing pages.Did you check that traffic from your email was being reported correctly? Sometimes email can be seen as direct traffic if the email doesn't report the referral, so it is worth checking.
Hopefully this gives you a starting point for further investigation!
King Regards
Jimmy
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
-
Should I Re-direct Domains to Internal Pages on Money Site
I have an ecommerce site that is fully built out with thousands of products. I own many industry related domains for the products that i sell. Many of these domains are sitting unused. I started to think that it would beneficial if i 301 redirect (at the registrar level) these domains to their SPECIFIC subcategories on my main money site. For example, i sell sporting goods and my main website is buysportinggoods.com I also own the following domains: basketballoutlet.com & baseballequipmentstore.com & footballpads.com Would it be wise or foolish (and potentially cause a Google penalty) if i did the following: Point basketballoutlet.com to buysportinggoods.com/basketballs Point baseballequipmentstore.com to buysportinggoods.com/baseball Point footballpads.com to buysportinggoods.com/football Please let me know your thoughts or experiences with similar situations. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Prime850 -
My Domain authority dropped 9 points... Does anyone have any suggestions to fix this significant drop.
My domain authority dropped by 9 points and I haven't done anything differently since the last scan. What is going on?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | infotrust20 -
How stupid is it to launch a new URL structure when our traffic is climbing?
We decided to redesign our site to make it responsive as Google is ranking sites based on mobile friendliness. Along with this we have changed our URL structure, meta tags, page content, site navigation, internal interlinking. How stupid is it to launch this site right in the middle of record traffic? Our traffic is climbing 10,000 more visitors every day with the current site. Visitors have increased 34% over the last 30 days compared to the previous 30 days.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CFSSEO0 -
Organic search traffic dropped 40% - what am I missing?
Have a client (ecommerce site with 1,000+ pages) who recently switched to OpenCart from another cart. Their organic search traffic (from Google, Yahoo, and Bing) dropped roughly 40%. Unfortunately, we weren't involved with the site before, so we can only rely on the wayback machine to compare previous to present. I've checked all the common causes of traffic drops and so far I mostly know what's probably not causing the issue. Any suggestions? Some URLs are the same and the rest 301 redirect (note that many of the pages were 404 until a couple weeks after the switch when the client implemented more 301 redirects) They've got an XML sitemap and are well-indexed. The traffic drops hit pretty much across the site, they are not specific to a few pages. The traffic drops are not specific to any one country or language. Traffic drops hit mobile, tablet, and desktop I've done a full site crawl, only 1 404 page and no other significant issues. Site crawl didn't find any pages blocked by nofollow, no index, robots.txt Canonical URLs are good Site has about 20K pages indexed They have some bad backlinks, but I don't think it's backlink-related because Google, Yahoo, and Bing have all dropped. I'm comparing on-page optimization for select pages before and after, and not finding a lot of differences. It does appear that they implemented Schema.org when they launched the new site. Page load speed is good I feel there must be a pretty basic issue here for Google, Yahoo, and Bing to all drop off, but so far I haven't found it. What am I missing?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AdamThompson0 -
Traffic dropped suddenly
-In early January 2013, we had to switch servers after many years with the same one. We were highly ranked and getting about 8500 unique visitors per month. -We didn't notice the traffic falling because we were focussed on a major site redesign and addition that we launched in April 2013. Visits continued to fall, this time also because the company that launched it didn't double check their work and had some dead links etc. Those were all fixed by approximately June 2013.- early January 2014 we switched servers again because we were afraid the new server we moved to was perhaps ranked poorly or was possibly a spamming site before. Currently, nothing has changed. What was about 8500 unique visitors per month 18 months ago, is now about 1,000 and no leads are coming in at all.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HasitR0 -
Our quilting site was hit by Panda/Penguin...should we start a second "traffic" site?
I built a website for my wife who is a quilter called LearnHowToMakeQuilts.com. However, it has been hit by Panda or Penguin (I’m not quite sure) and am scared to tell her to go ahead and keep building the site up. She really wants to post on her blog on Learnhowtomakequilts.com, but I’m afraid it will be in vain for Google’s search engine. Yahoo and Bing still rank well. I don’t want her to produce good content that will never rank well if the whole site is penalized in some way. I’ve overly optimized in linking strongly to the keywords “how to make a quilt” for our main keyword, mainly to the home page and I think that is one of the main reasons we are incurring some kind of penalty. First main question: From looking at the attached Google Analytics image, does anyone know if it was Panda or Penguin that we were “hit” by? And, what can be done about it? (We originally wanted to build a nice content website, but were lured in by a get rich quick personality to rather make a “squeeze page” for the Home page and force all your people through that page to get to the really good content. Thus, our avenge time on site per person is terrible and Pages per Visit is low at: 1.2. We really want to try to improve it some day. She has a local business website, Customcarequilts.com that did not get hit. Second question: Should we start a second site rather than invest the time in trying to repair the damage from my bad link building and article marketing? We do need to keep the site up and running because it has her online quilting course for beginner quilters to learn how to quilt their first quilt. We host the videos through Amazon S3 and were selling at least one course every other day. But now that the Google drop has hit, we are lucky to sell one quilting course per month. So, if we start a second site we can use that to build as a big content site that we can use to introduce people to learnhowtomakequilts.com that has Martha’s quilting course. So, should we go ahead and start a new fresh site rather than to repair the damage done by my bad over optimizing? (We’ve already picked out a great website name that would work really well with her personal facebook page.) Or, here’s a second option, which is to use her local business website: customcarequilts.com. She created it in 2003 and has had it ever since. It is only PR 1. Would this be an option? Anyway I’m looking for guidance on whether we should pursue repairing the damage and whether we should start a second fresh site or use an existing site to create new content (for getting new quilters to eventually purchase her course). Brad & Martha Novacek rnUXcWd
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BradNovi0 -
My homepage dropped off of Google today? Any ideas?
My site, www.leaffilter.com, previously ranked #1 for searches of "leaffilter" and "leaf filter". Today the #1 ranking for "leaffilter" with Google is gone. Well, it's not gone on all internet connection. At home the #1 ranking is in place. At the office computer it is not anywhere near page 1. I'm testing searches logged in, not logged in, cache and cookies cleared, different browsers. Other, secondary pages, are appearing on page 1. It looks as if the homepage is just no longer indexed...but not on all internet connection. Any ideas what is happening? Does anyone have any troubleshooting tips?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LF_digital0 -
Can you pass social signals with a 301 re-direct?
Does a 301 re-direct pass social signals such as 'likes' 'tweets' and '+1s"?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0