Spike in Direct visits with Drop in Google Organic Visits

[phogan]

Does anyone have an explanation for why Google organic visits plummeted while direct visits rose the same amount.  Total visits have been very normal.

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[GalcoIndustrial]

Hi Patrick,

I'm really glad I found your question/post.  I'm looking at a similar scenario in which there has been a major uptick on 3/11/14 for Direct Traffic (and similarly, a slight drop in Organic).  We also have a phone tracking system that works with Cookies to display a certain telephone number based on the web referral that is reporting a similar anomaly. Many of our customers are a little "old school" and still use Internet Explorer to browse our website (about 50% of the users) and I noticed that, more than any other browser, IE showed the greatest transparency between the spike in Direct and the drop in Organic - all coinciding with a specific date: 3/11/2014 (see below).

It's also interesting to note that Google Webmaster Tools launched their Index Status Tool update on 3/9/14.  I've always been under the impression that Google Analytics tracked both http and https traffic together, but since the update to the GWT tool, is it possible that the traffic was tracked as Direct rather than Organic (it's sad to say, but yes, we just recently noticed that Google had indexed both http and https versions of our website by (our) mistake, so, who knows...).

I also noticed that Microsoft had issued Vulnerability reports for that specific date as well - and one of the main technologies they listed as "effected" was Internet Explorer.  So.... lots of detective work, but I do like the checklist that Paul Thompson had put together for you.  Very helpful indeed!

Please let us know if you have any updates to your organic/direct traffic numbers!

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[phogan]

Over the past week, we have decided to convert the site to Wordpress so I am hoping the problem will resolve after that.

[ThompsonPaul]

Most welcome., Patrick. Does it look like one of those issues might be a candidate for the source of your problem?

P.

[phogan]

Thank you very much for the insight.

[ThompsonPaul]

This is clearly a case of organic traffic being misclassified as direct, since total traffic is unchanged and the drop in organic happens exactly at the same time as the uptick in direct.

Since direct traffic is specifically visits for which no referrer has been captured, it means something's changed to cause the referrer to be stripped out or not set on the majority of your organic visits.

There's a looong list of the kinds of things that can cause this, such as:

• during http to https redirect (or vice versa) the referrer may not be passed (this is the first thing I'd check)
• incorrect subdomain or cross-domain tracking can strip the referrer.
• 302 redirects sometimes caused the referrer to be dropped
• problems with cookies being lost/corrupted. (this will often show as a major shift in pages/visit)
• javascript missing from certain entry pages (means any further page view looks like a direct)
• changes to PPC tracking. If you were getting lots of paid search traffic that wasn't tagged, it will look like organic. If incorrect/broken tagging is then added, it will look like direct traffic

Bottom line is, something has changed that is affecting the collection of referrer data. It's gonna take some serious detective work to figure out what, because these can often be changes that wouldn't - at first glance - appear to have anything to do with Analytics. (This is why I try to push clients so hard to track EVERYTHING they change on a website with a note in the Annotations section of the Analytics account.)

The fact you have a clear date for the occurrence may make things a little easier. Go back through your email from around that date and see if anything there alerts you to any work that was being on the site at the time e.g. SSL or domain renewals, marketing campaigns that used redirects starting or ending, etc. You can also look at the Change History section of the account (under Admin) to see if anything catches your eye.

Good luck! Hope that helps with some places to start looking?

Paul

[MikeRoberts]

My first guess would be some sort of reporting error as I'm not sure what would cause such a quick and drastic shift like that. Second, I would check if the entrance/landing pages in analytics are the same or not. Check the related pages to see if anything may have been changed on them to create this. Two of the sites I work on have had some changes over the past few months with respects to organic vs. direct traffic where our organic has slipped a bit more and more but it is turning into direct traffic, but definitely not on the scale of what has happened to you.

[Andy.Drinkwater]

If that is what has happened. I'll be honest, I haven't seen something quite like this before, so would just be a fact-finding mission to track the problem down.

-Andy

[phogan]

I think the better question should have been "Why were Google organic visits suddenly counted as direct visits instead?"

[Andy.Drinkwater]

That rules out Page layout.

It does look like a penalty of some sort though. it might be worth checking just to make sure someone hasn't disallowed the whole site from Google in some manner.

Then there is the question of why has traffic increased at the same time as the drop? Do they run a mailing list at all? Have you had a look through the list of referrers to see where this traffic is coming from? Is it all from direct visits, i.e people are typing in the URL?

-Andy

[phogan]

Thanks for the response Andy.  I don't think anything had been changed, the site has been very static for the last few years.  The date is January 25th.  But total visits have not fluctuated other than seasonably.  No Ads on the site.

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Hi Patrick,

Are there any ads on the site? What was the exact date of the organic drop? I'm just wondering if perhaps it could have been the Page Layout algorithm update?

Was any work carried out prior to this?

-Andy