Has anyone noticed a dramatic drop in direct visits year over year in GA across multiple sites?
-
I monitor about 10 websites in GA. Many of these sites are in a stable phase of their lifecycle. I've noticed this year that direct visits on all my sites and even friends sites have dropped by 20-60%. Has anyone seen any explanation for this or noticed this when compared to previous year? In every instance I have no penalties, notices, anything and the drop is made up completely of "direct visits".
-
Did you guys ever make any sense out of this?
-
Did you ever come up with any explanation for this?
-
Yes I am seeing it too. Very strange. Overall my traffic on my 3 biggest sites is up, but direct visitis is down by about 30%.
-
@jp have you come up with any possible thoughts on what it could be? I am really surprised that there aren't more people talking about this. I'm at Mozcon right now. I would like to see if someone here could answer it.
-
We are experiencing a similar phenomenon.
-
I didn't ask for methods. I'm looking for an explanation of why a small sample of sites has seen huge drops in direct visits. Has anyone seen this issue?
-
This does not answer my question at all. I'm not a web novice.
I don't have your resume or a list of your websites.
So, I gave you solid data and shared a method of increasing your direct visits.
Sorry you didn't like it.
-
This does not answer my question at all. I'm not a web novice. I've been using analytics tools for years. I know for a fact there is something going on with the reporting and someone must have seen this. Here are the industries I have seen this on.
design blog
design downloads
custom t-shirts
If you look at the current month or any month this year vs the same timeframe last year you see drops anywhere from 30-60% in directs. It is not affecting my sales. It is causing goal conversions to climb arbitrarily. These sites are not all related. I have even checked against other friends with established websites and seen the same thing. If you have a site that is in a growth mode you won't notice it. I have a site that is up 250% in organic that doesn't appear the same way. Older properties with more stable traffic and less growth are showing it.
-
Has anyone seen any explanation for this or noticed this when compared to previous year?
I am only watching a few sites and we are working every day on those sites. Direct visits are climbing climbing on those sites. If you are continuously adding new content to these sites that engages the visitor your direct visits should be going up.
We are adding new content to these sites every week. And showing that content prominently on the homepage and across the site with server side includes. We also have programs that rotate the content on the homepage so visitors who visit multiple times in a week see different content on each visit. This freshness makes people come back to see what is new and that type of visit is usually a direct visit or a domain query, which I believe are enormously valuable for increasing your rankings.
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
-
Abnormally High Direct Traffic Volume
We have abnormally high amounts of direct traffic to our site. It's comprising over half of all web traffic while organic is second with considerably less. From there the volume decreases amongst other channels. I've never seen such a huge proportion of traffic being attributed the Direct. Does anyone know how to test this or see if there is an error in Google Analytics reporting?
Reporting & Analytics | | graceflack 01 -
Sudden Drop in Index Status on GSC
Hi all, We've seen a sudden drop in index status on GSC from 19,000 to 12,000. Rankings, referring domains, organic traffic etc. have not changed. However, we have implemented a huge number of redirects and done a site migration from http to https in the past year. Could this have an effect? Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | SMVSEO0 -
Huge Analytics discrepancy when I turned off Analytics Module & Turned on GA via GTM
Hello, I was running universal GA via a GA Drupal module. We setup Google Tag Manager and setup a GA tag to run through GTM. When we pushed the GTM container live our Real Time was at around 1900 and when we turned off the Drupal module the Real Time was reporting around 1100. After 24 hours the sessions for that day were about 100k lower than what they usually are. Any ideas Why the larger discrepancy? Any places that are obvious to look? *I didn't setup the original Drupal GA module, nor do I know who did. Thanks
Reporting & Analytics | | JJLWeber0 -
Should Google Trends Match Organic Traffic to My Site?
When looking at Google Trends and my Organic Traffic (using GA) as percentages of their total yearly values I have a correlation of .47. This correlation doesn't seem right when you consider that Google Trends (which is showing relative search traffic data) should match up pretty strongly to your Organic Traffic. Any thoughts on what might be going on? Why isn't Google Trends correlating with Organic Traffic? Shouldn't they be pulling from the same data set? Thanks, Jacob
Reporting & Analytics | | jacob.young.cricut0 -
Curious, anyone ever had over half of their indexed links drop on an e-commerce site?
In a year went from around 300k indexed pages to around >100k according to GWT. Could this be duplicate content issue, lost links, spam, aged links or all of the above? either way an audit is in order. Thanks! Chris
Reporting & Analytics | | Sundance_Kidd0 -
March 1st Decline in Visits and Pageviews
This site was upgraded from Joomla 1 to Joomla 3 and launched on Feb 27th. The SEF structure has not changed. The extension sh404sef tracks the 404s and there are only a few dozen from mistyped urls, so I have to assume the historical ranking has not been affected. How can I figure out why there is such a decline on March 1st from 4400 to 1500 visits? Is it coincidence after the new launch or did something happen with google on March 1st? http://transitionconsultants.com Screenshot%202014-04-11%2009.47.05.png
Reporting & Analytics | | modernmagic0 -
GA Goal Tracking for Proactive Chat
Hi all, Just wondering whether anyone knows how I'd be able to track Proactive Chats as a goal in Google Analytics? So when someone visits our site, and we proactively contact them by initiating a chat (rather than a reactive chat where the visitor initiates it). Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | AdrianCordiner0 -
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