Can the end of a competition cause a drop in organic visitors?
-
Hi everyone,
Over the last six months I've been running a few competitions on my largest site, but noticed a very large decrease in organic sessions just after the third one ended.
For reference, the site is ~10 years old and gets a couple of million sessions per month.Organic sessions throughout last year and before the holiday periods were around 800k/month, which then increased by 50% during the holiday period alongside a competition I ran.These competitions double the pages per session and add another 1.5 minutes onto session duration.
At the end of one of the competitions this year, daily organic sessions halved overnight and are now below the baseline of last year - and not improving.
Some possible causes include;
- Google update - unlikely, because the date of the drop doesn't coincide with any increase in SERP volatility that I can find
- The extremely quick overnight drop in engagement (pages/session and session duration falling back to pre-comp baseline) caused Google to believe our site to be less popular and thus less deserving of rankings
- Visitors who've been bombarded with month-long competitions are sick of seeing them and are not searching for my site so often
- Email tagging - in the week before, UTM tracking parameters were added to all emails (of which there are a lot of subscribers) - as the number of Email visitors in Analytics increased, Organic did slightly decrease at the same time. I think this is unlikely, but I wonder if somehow some of our email visitors were previously being classed as Organic as well as some being Direct
- Incorrectly tagged as Direct - at the same time as the organic drop, Direct traffic doubled - it has since decreased back to just above the Direct baseline, however Organic has not improved
I'd just be interested to know if anyone has any experience with something similar happening and, if so, what do you think the cause was and how did you rectify it?
Thank you very much for your input in advance!
-
Thanks for the input Eric!
I've been looking into your suggestion of links being removed and it looks as though in a period of just under two weeks, we did lose about 40 referring domains - this started just before the end of the competition.
However, since then we've gained just under 200 more referring domains, so that doesn't appear to be the issue. According to Ahrefs, the number of keywords the sites ranks for did decrease around about the relevant time, but not significantly, so I wonder if it is more to do with the engagement side of things...
Would you suppose that after the increase in engagement due to the competition, visitors then get bored of using the site and decide to leave (potentially because of not winning?), causing sessions to drop down below pre-competition levels - which then might cause a decrease in the number of searchers looking for the site?
Many thanks for your help! -
We've seen this happen with a lot of sites, especially with sites that are related certain events. For example, a 5k race or a marathon website would suffer the same fate.
It's the drop in engagement on the site, as the competition is over so visitors have no need to go to the site anymore. Also, the site may have lost links pointing to the site. The site owner pointing links to you figured the competition was over so they removed the links.
I would take a look at the links to the site and look at the historical links (using Majestic.com) or see if you have a list of links from previous link evaluations--crawl those links and see if any of them have changed or been removed. If they have, you may be able to see if you can get those links back.
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
-
Drop in google.com / referral trafic
Hi, On one of our sites (after the release of a new version, including redirections), we've seen a drop in referral trafic from google.fr (france). I know that this trafic usually comes from Google Images but it doesnt seem to be the case this time. The referal path is "/" and not "imgres" as it usually is when it comes from google images. The search trafic hasnt dropped tough... The site is a job listing site. We also saw a drop from indeed.com, I guess their crawler got lost in our new site... Any idea on the possible google site it could come from? Thank you,
Reporting & Analytics | | AdrienLargus0 -
Weird visitors to my site
Hi, I am in the process of disentangling myself from a dodgy SEO company. At some point they set up another GA account on my site without consulting me. I replaced the tracking code with my original account on my wordpress site, placing the tracking code on the dashboard. There is a box in the dashboard for you to do this. For some reason the account he created is still giving me analytics but from mostly one url :forum.topic55622342.darodar.com. It has marked it as a referral? When you click it it redirects to this site : http://activities.aliexpress.com/computers_channel.php?aff_platform=aaf&sk=vV3B2RJYB%3A&cpt=1421321021096&null There have been 218 visits from this "referral" in the last month and also 2 direct visits to a clients online gallery (i'm a photographer). I am guessing the code for this new account is still on the site somewhere? Funnily enough in the first month I was getting targeted by spam using my contact form and I was a bit perplexed as to why. We had to put captchas on the contact forms which I was loathe to do as its another step for a client to have to go through causing resistance. Has this link got something to do with it? I have recently disavowed a lot of toxic links he created, so maybe they had something to do with it? Best wishes. David.
Reporting & Analytics | | WallerD0 -
How can I redirect incoming links from an old version of my site ending in .ctlg and .ivnu?
My original site was published in 2001 using "version 2" software from Ivenue, the hosting company that I signed up with at that time. The site's structure was built in such a way that the primary category pages ended in the extension .ivnu. Product or item pages on the shopping cart side ended in the extension .ctlg. My site's name was and is [Lamplight Feather, Inc.](<a class="webkit-html-attribute-value webkit-html-external-link" href="http://www.tonyhill.net/" target="_blank">http://www.tonyhill.net/</a>). We built our business between 2001 and 2011 and by the last three years (2009 - 2011) of using their version two were averaging a million dollars per year in gross sales. We decided to "upgrade" to Ivenue's "version 3" in 2011 to take advantage of some more modern options and because their newer software created web pages ending in .html which we thought more desirable. We made the switch in late 2011. But it was a disaster. Traffic and sales dropped precipitously. For the past two years (2012-2013) our annual gross sales average dropped to $400,000. (Two other factors were involved beside losing the many incoming links and link juice we had built up over the years: Panda came in that fall and my little niche market (decorative feathers) was flooded with competitors.) However as I try to rebuild our traffic and business little by little, I am stumped as to how to redirect the many incoming links that went to our first site's .ivnu and .ctlg pages. I have constructed redirects for some of our current but changed .html pages like this and put them in the file cabinet and they work: For (example): http://www.tonyhill.net/feathers_c384589.html then But trying the same thing for (example) http://www.tonyhill.net/craftfeathers.ivnu still returns a 404. Is there something I am missing. Ivenue is useless in this matter by the way. Their "technicians" are no help. I plan to be migrating my site once again to a new hosting company and hope to solve this problem before then. Thanks for the attention, Tony Hill This is an example from Google Webmaster of the type of links that show up as 404's that I would like to redirect: | URL: | http://www.tonyhill.net/productCat96521.ctlg | | | Error details | Linked from | | <colgroup><col></colgroup>
Reporting & Analytics | | featherman
| http://www.tonyhill.net/productCat43986.ctlg |
| http://forum.muppetcentral.com/showthread.php?t=21416&page=2 |
| http://www.cosplay.com/showthread.php?p=3832751 |
| http://forum.muppetcentral.com/showthread.php?t=21416&page=2&highlight=fur |
| http://www.muppetcentral.com/forum/threads/puppeteers-resources-links.19330/page-2 |
| http://www.muppetcentral.com/forum/threads/how-do-you-like-my-puppets.18549/page-2 | | | | |0 -
If I install google Analytics, that can affect my SEO.?
I purchased a site that has a lot of Backlinks and when I started to make changes like installing google analytics! i suspect the performance in search engine was getting worst because of that, so I removed.
Reporting & Analytics | | pparma
Now I'm trying MOZ and needs GA, should I install it again??
Maybe it analyces the backlinks and tells google, I don't know, is that possible?0 -
Can't seem to rank for keyword "home care grand rapids" - need some advice
I am trying to rank for "home care grand rapids" and am having a really difficult time. My site: http://healthcareassociates.net has better backlinks, keywords and other seo markers than my competitors but I still can't seem to rank. The keyword and associated keywords (home care grand rapids michigan, home health care grand rapids, etc.) are only 31-33% difficulty and my site/page rank is better than the leading sites. What gives? Todd
Reporting & Analytics | | t1kuslik0 -
Huge Ranking drop without touching the page
I was ranked #5 for the keyword "Become a Sportscaster" - had been in the top 10 for months, then all of a sudden dropped to #46. I haven't touched this page in a few months, so I don't think I messed anything up. Any thoughts on why such a dramatic drop would happen? Brian Clapp Founder, SportsTVJobs.com
Reporting & Analytics | | sportstvjobs0 -
How can I see the history reports?
Hi, I want to see the history reports for my ranking. For example I can how my website traffic changed in past few months using Google Analytics but I am not able to monitor the performance of my keywords on seomoz. Is there any way to do it?
Reporting & Analytics | | ashish2110 -
Sudden Drop in Direct Traffic
We recently had a some changes to our site, adding new sub categories, moving products around, etc... We implemented the changes on Thursday of last week and had a normal day around 800+ visitors. The very next day our # of visitors dropped in half to around 400+ and has stayed that way all weekend. I thought it might be that some links may have changed but I checked all of the links and they are the same as before with the exception of new pages. I checked to make sure that the google analytics code was still in the code and it is. I read that it could be DNS propagation timing issue but it's been 3 days and nothing's changed. I'm fairly certain that we are not being penalized or pandalized by google as our referrals and organic search results have not changed only the amount of direct traffic. Anyone have any ideas on what to look at or what to do?
Reporting & Analytics | | LizIslCo0