Google Update?

[sourcelinemedia]

We have a website that for the past several weeks has been very consistent at between 13,500 and 14,200 daily visits and this site received 15,600 last Thursday.

THIS week, Monday is at 22,200, Tuesday is at 26,200, and at mid-day today (at about our traffic halfway point in the day) we're already at 14,000 today.

This was a site that was bringing about 14,000 visits as of May 16th last year and dropped to 11,000 the following week.   The traffic to this site this week is so far beyond statistical analysis that there must have been something that happened.

[ballnotes]

Is it possible that this direct traffic is coming from email? I've seen big direct traffic spikes when a link has "gone viral" over email. The other thing I would check for is multiple Google analytics tags on the home page (double counting your traffic), but you would probably see a crazy low bounce rate if that were the case.

[sourcelinemedia]

Possible tracking issues are not checking out.  3rd party advertisers are showing higher impressions and clicks.

Traffic by specific service providers... Comcast, Roadrunner, Cox, etc.. are all consistently higher at the pace of traffic growth.  Traffic from all of these sources have a graph that looks identical; Showing the same increase at the same time.

Further, the non-U.S. traffic is down by percentage so the spike is coming from domestic traffic originating in the United States.

Average time on site for the last 30 days is: 1:20... minute twenty seconds. Month of January was 1:24. The past two days is 1:02.  With traffic being up 70% if they were all brief hits - then the past two days'  visitor duration should be cut in half.

The home page traffic which is where the spike in visitors are landing on the site has a visitor duration of about 22 seconds lower than usual, which is 55 seconds.

The visitor duration difference looks more like the traffic isn't targeted, although not 100% uninterested either.

We have done a lot of work on this site since losing some traffic to Panda last summer.  I just wouldn't expect such a dramatic increase without an update in Google but regardless the increase is in "direct" visits and not from search.

[SL_SEM]

Has time spent on page changed at all? If the bounce rate is higher I would figure it would have dropped. Also is it just visits that are up? Did pageviews stay roughly the same?

When something like this happens I try to look for any indicator that analytics is having tracking issues.

For example if a user came to the site, then went to a page that is somehow killing my cookie information or ending my session somehow then that would cause the visits to spike while pageviews stayed the same. This would also drive my bounce rate up.

This happens often if you have a third party tool like a booking engine or chat tool that uses a different URL, and you aren't using the linker functionality where you need to.

Another suggestion would be to do a comparison to recent history of location and service provider dimensions to see if any specific location or service provider is spiking compared to recent slower times.

If all of that looks legit it may just be that other marketing efforts are paying off, and people are coming back to your site...

[sourcelinemedia]

Yeah, revenue is up.  We have several ad programs running and affiliate systems that are outside of our tracking software - so it seems that 3rd parties are seeing it too.

Now, revenue isn't up in a straight line with the traffic increase because we are not as aggressive on our home page with ads and affiliates.  Bounce rate is higher on that page than before but time spent on page isn't?  Bounce rate went from 48% to 79% which scares me.   Seems the traffic coming in is less targeted now than our typical sources.

[Carson-Ward]

Interesting stuff - is revenue up as well then? Could there be an issue with analytics code counting people twice, or not counting people in the past?

[sourcelinemedia]

Carson thanks for your response.

Here's how strange it is.  There's an overall boost in traffic on most of the pages but they are trickling out from the home page.  The home page traffic is up tremendously.  Our direct visits: Not driven by Google, Yahoo or any other significant referrer - the spike seems to be from direct visits.  No spike in keywords, nothing.  Last Tuesday/Wednesday's home page PV= 1,435.  This Tuesday/Wednesday's home page PV = 22,594.

I was wondering if there was an algorithm change with Google maybe temporarily from a URL where the SSL system they are using is giving referring the visitor as a no-follow. Google I ask, because I don't know of another traffic source that could produce these numbers.  I wish that I knew so I could duplicate it!!

Affiliate impressions and revenue are up in reflection of the traffic change, the average time spent on the home page is almost identical to historic #s (55 seconds).

Not to toot my horn but we are good at this stuff and we can't figure it out. There's no referrer for this new traffic - it is all registering as direct - and still seems to be increasing.

No significant blog, forum or social media mentions either. The thought was that maybe the site was mentioned on TV or something but even that would have spiked inside a 2-3 hour window and then go back down.  Not keep gaining.

The site is samplewords.com and typically gets about 365k visits per month and 825k PV.  I would love to hear someone's theory on this.

Maybe it's something simple I'm missing while I look for something more technical?

[Carson-Ward]

We are not aware of any significant changes since last Thursday, but I'm glad to hear that your results are doing well! It might be interesting to go into analytics and see where the users are coming from. Are they coming through Google-organic, or did you perhaps pick up some coverage that is sending you referring traffic?

If it is organic traffic, you can then look at organic keywords, compare it to the past, and see which keywords have increased the most. It's always good to know what's going right and how you can duplicate it  It's also worth looking at your content report to see which organic landing pages are doing well.