Very specific visitor drop
-
Hello there,
Last week I discovered an unnatural drop in the direct traffic channel while analyzing all traffic channels. I dived into the data and discovered the following aspects of the traffic drop:
The drop is only caused by:
- Direct traffic coming from browser Safari on Apple tablets (Safari traffic includes 83% of all direct tablet traffic)
- Android, mobile and desktop traffic didn't drop at all
- The direct tablet traffic dropped on the 1st of October
- It has never dropped before and it has grown naturally every month since more than a year
- In week 42 we only made 35% of the revenue we made in week 39. We're talking about k's.
I attatched two screenshots coming from Google Analytics: the drop of direct tablet traffic compared to direct mobile traffic, and the drop of direct Safari tablet traffic compared to direct Android tablet traffic.
We asked our web developer (SEOShop) about possible changes they made around the 1st of October to i.e. our mobile website. They said that they didn't change anything but they pointed to Hummingbird that has been released around that date. I can't link the traffic issue with Hummingbird though..
Can anybody let their light shine about this one? I'm very thankful.
Marcel
-
Hi Mike,
Thanks for this piece of information. This is exactly what happened. I checked the other side of the data: organic Safari tablet traffic and it has grown since the first of October.
Thanks again.
Marcel
-
This may help explain some things http://searchengineland.com/rejoice-safari-is-once-again-providing-google-referral-information-in-ios-168493
-
It seems I recently read that Safari had some sort of code change that was causing GA to not track visits from those systems. But I have no idea where I read it. Probably worth a google search for something like "safari bug with google analytics"....
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 Domain Authority
Hi there, Our domain Authority has dropped significantly from 26 to 19 over the last month. This had been fairly stable over the previous 18 months. We haven't done any significant work to the website that I could point to. Does anyone have any ideas why this would happen? Any recent Google Updates that could be the cause? Regards Andy
Reporting & Analytics | | andy_simpson1 -
Branded terms CTR drop
Moz Hivemind, I'm working with an ecom beauty brand and retailer who re-platformed their website at the end of August last year. Their CTR dropped from 70% plus for branded terms to 50% over night and has steadily declined ever since, down to the low 30s as an average the last few months. Their rankings for branded terms have remained in the number 1 position, despite a slight blip at launch, which is to be expected. They admit that some new distribution deals with major retailers have added some competition to the mix, but much later in the year. I could totally understand a rankings drop and an initial hit, but has anyone seen anything like this before, is there something on the new site that could impact CTR like this, either in the SERPs or perhaps a reporting issue? As the click itself is taking place in the SERP and their rankings are solid, other than the meta description, which they swear was unchanged the first few months after launch, any ideas what could be happening here? Thanks so much.
Reporting & Analytics | | Algorhythm_jT1 -
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 -
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!
Reporting & Analytics | | serges780 -
Hello, our domain authority dropped significantly overnight from 37 to 29\. We have been building good links from high DA pages and producing quality, regular content.
Hello, our domain authority dropped significantly overnight from 37 to 29. We have been building good links from high DA sites and producing regular, good quality content. Anyone able to offer any ideas why? Thanks
Reporting & Analytics | | ProMOZ1231 -
Domain Authority Drop
We just witnessed a domain authority drop. We went from 24 to 21.Not sure why. We've been creating fresh new content for our site over the last few days and haven't done anything that would cause it.
Reporting & Analytics | | StickyLife
Any advice would be greatly appreciated.0 -
Bounce rate consistently dropping
We started using SEO MOZ campaigns and crawl diagnostics for our site in November 2011. At that time, our bounce rate was 57.58%. From there, it has consistently dropped. Dec. 57% Jan. 24.86% Feb. 14.61% March 17.48 % April 12.35% We started out with 1,000's of errors showing up in the crawl diagnostics, down to under 50. could this be associated with the bounce rate drop?
Reporting & Analytics | | Stevej240 -
Strange Visitors To Website
OK, not quite sure how this is happening, but......... I am having referral traffic from online game sites. Actually quite a bit of it and it seems to be raising my bounce rate a bit. B Suggestions anyone? Below is my website: http://www.allianceconcretepumps.com Thank You!!
Reporting & Analytics | | APICDA0