Why has there been Massive increase in traffic to my clients .eu site after redirects were initiated?

[daracreative]

Hi guys,

This is a strange one thats really bugging me. I have a client that redirected their domain to a brand new domain that was already live for the previous two months. I have been trying analyse the data however I can't quite understand why there is a massive increase in visitors from the United States when the old site was redirected.

The redirection took place at the beginning of July. It was badly managed in terms of the mapping of 301 redirects however thats not the issue here. The level of traffic is gradually decreasing I imagine due to the high level of bounces. The site in question is an EU funded website for education.

The old site in the first 2 weeks of June received around 500 visits from the USA while the new site in the first 2 weeks of July (2 weeks into the redirects) received around 3,000 visits from the USA. The new site had previously received only 300 visits for the same period as the old site in the 1st 2 weeks of June.

Any idea why this might be?

Thanks

Rob

[daracreative]

Hi Robert,

Thanks for your reply. Unfortunately I can't mention the clients name in this instance. There was definitely a mistake with redirects. I still don't think that explains the sudden rise in traffic (direct traffic in GA) fro the USA.

For a few days after the initial redirection there was a 400% increase in traffic which nose dived the days after. The reason it nose dived I'm guessing was because visitors we're taken to a 404 page and this is obviously a bad user experience so the search results have dropped perhaps because of this. Its frustrating as I can't see the keywords, only the landing pages under direct traffic in GA so its hard for me to see exactly if this is true or not. It has been since been repaired and pages are redirected to their closest relative but many are folder redirects instead of page to page. This is because much of the content has not been migrated.

I will continue will my investigation and let you know if I find out anymore information.

Thanks for your time.

Rob

[RobertFisher]

Rob, 
With a question like this, without the benefit of knowing the site, it is nearly impossible to answer the question. I would look at it this way:

Is there a mistake that could have been made with the redirects or with the GA code in the new site that is making the data corrupt? (An example was my famous, "We lowered your bounce rate from 47% to nearly zero!" with a client we built a site for. Then I had to explain we had the GA code in the header and the footer and it was really the same...). That is where I would look first if I could think of no event in the US that would have caused the traffic increase.

I would look at the referred traffic to see if it holds a clue. I would look at the US for any event or at the site owner for anything that could have caused an increase; is the increase to a specific page or group of pages? At this point you are looking for clues.

I hope this at least points you in the right direction.

Robert