Something strange going on with new client's site...

[SteveOllington]

Please forgive my stupidity if there is something obvious here which I have missed (I keep assuming that must be the case), but any advice on this would be much appreciated.

We've just acquired a new client. Despite having a site for plenty of time now they did not previously have analytics with their last company (I know, a crime!).

They've been with us for about a month now and we've managed to get them some great rankings already. To be fair, the rankings weren't bad before us either.

Anyway. They have multiple position one rankings for well searched terms both locally and nationally. One would assume therefore that a lot of their traffic would come from Google right?

Not according to their analytics. In fact, very little of it does... instead, 70% of their average 3,000 visits per month comes from just one referring site. A framed version of their site which is through reachlocal, which itself doesn't rank for any of their terms.

I don't get it...

The URL of the site is: www.namgrass.co.uk

(ignore there being a .com too, that's a portal as they cover other countries).

The referring site causing me all this confusion is: http://namgrass.rtrk.co.uk/

(see source code at the bottom for the reachlocal thing).

Now I know reach local certainly isn't sending them all that traffic, so why does GA say it is... and what is this reachlocal thing anyway?? I mean, I know what reachlocal is, but what gives here with regards to it?

Any ideas, please??

[SteveOllington]

They're bidding on his brand name... so he's paying them for traffic he would have gotten anyway (as no ad would come up, he'd be the top results instead of the ad... or he could have the ad but run it himself).

I guess other than that it's no problem though... if it's sending him converting traffic. Just annoying I can't do much about the analytics, I can't see the keywords people are arriving with when they arrive through there, and ReachLocal won't share their data.

[SteveOllington]

He said they were using someone for PPC, and that someone won't let me link the GA and Adwords accounts... that's all the info I could get on it. I assumed it was just normal PPC with another paranoid data hoarder though, not this stuff.

[Thos003]

I used reach local at one point. It was all ppc traffic. Your client should know about this. It seems odd that if they are not paying reach local that reach local would continue to send them traffic.

[adrianvender1]

The framed page is actually loading content from "namgrass-px.rtrk.co.uk" which could have been a dupe issue, but the are using a meta robots "noindex, nofollow" so I wouldn't be concerned since this should not appear in the search engine index.

Because of the framed referral issue, you should expect a 100% correlation between # of visits to ReachLocal page and # of visits in GA referral reports for that site.  So if ReachLocal sends 1000 visits to that page, you'll see about 1000 in GA.

[SteveOllington]

Thanks guys, I've just been looking into it and searched reach local on the internal search here... it seems to be as you say, reach local have made framed versions on the site which they use to send PPC traffic which they sell back to you.

Am I right in thinking that, as it's framed there is no possibility of dupe content issues?

Something (apart from the analytics) just seems wrong about it all.

Of the search terms, some are low traffic, but some are relatively high.

[adrianvender1]

When the ReachLocal site loads the frame actually holding the site content, it will actually treat the parent window as the referral.  If you look at the _utm.gif hit going to the Google Analytics servers, look at the utmr parameter (the referring URL that GA will recognize) it has a value of "http://namgrass.rtrk.co.uk/".  Also, the utmz source/medium is set to "namgrass.rtrk.co.uk/referral" which is what you'll see in the Google Analytics reports.

So, what's happening is that the framed ReachLocal site IS getting traffic.  It could be organic, email, PPC.... anything but we wouldn't know because the frames are dropping the real attribution and forcing a referral from namgrass.rtrk.co.uk. So, although the site may not be ranked, remember that it could get traffic through other means.

You can use tools like Fiddler or a Firefox extension called FireBug to monitor the Google Analytics _utm.gif hits and see what information is passed to the GA servers.

[AdoptionHelp]

My guess is that a lot of that traffic is paid for by advertising, either online or offline. Reachlocal will do things like frame a site in their system to track incoming traffic from a particular ad or campaign. They'll also use unique phone numbers to track conversions by phone. So if your client has a significant advertising budget this could explain why lots of their traffic arrives this way.

If the keywords they rank for are really low traffic keywords, this would add some more weight to my guess. If not, back to the drawing board? Is there anything else unusual about their setup that may provide clues?