Average Session duration has dropped on May 12th and not recovered
-
Hello,
On May 12th my average session duration within Google Analytics went from 1.12 seconds to 10 seconds. Every month since then it has had an average session duration of around 10 seconds.
My traffic over this time has increased. I am concerned that the website is being attacked by bots. What should I be looking out for to work out what is happening?
Many thanks for your help.
-
Sounds like you might have a problem with multiple instances of Google's Google Analytics tracking code on your site. Check that first.
-
I agree. You should get with your host and review your websites server stats. This will give you more detailed information about where the traffic is coming from. Hopefully not bots!!
In the event that it is, this would explain why the average visit duration has dropped so drastically.
Also keep in mind that if there is actual new traffic coming to your site (not bots), this could also be contributing to the drop in visit duration as new site visitors tend to spend less time than a returning visitor.
Hope this helps!!!
-
Check with your hosting provider. They should be able to tell you if your website is being accessed unnaturally.
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
-
Big drop in organic traffic after moving the website-should we still do 301 redirects?
Hi,
Reporting & Analytics | | martin1970
We have a website that got redesigned with new urls in Jan 31, 2018. Since then our SEO traffic has gone down big time and to never recover. We did not do any 301 redirects back then (very stupid I know but I was not in charge then). So my question is would it be beneficial to 301 redirect old urls that were once ranked but now have all 404 errors or is it too late to do these 301 to gain any benefits? If a page that was once ranked and then have a 404 error, how long does google keep that 404 page in their database? I have heard information saying that although the page is a 404 it may still be indexed in their backend for some time and then it completely drops off all together. If so do you know how long time they would keep those 404 in their database? The old urls may have had good backlinks pointed to them because the organic traffic was good back then. So I wonder if doing 301 right now would help send some link juice over to the new urls? Or would this be a complete waste of time? Cheers Martin1 -
Scary Traffic Drop — Slower at First, Now Much Sharper
Hi. My website, dailytekk.com, has been steadily losing viewers since April. In recent weeks, though, the drop has been much more significant — scarily so. Almost all our traffic comes from Google, organically. In the last 30 days I've lost 135k page views. I'm not sure if we just have content that is getting old, if Google changed something in the algorithm, if we are being penalized, if AMP pages are having a negative effect, etc. I would love to find a great consultant to help us figure this out and get back on the right track. We seem to be losing traffic despite our best efforts at this point. Thanks, Chris
Reporting & Analytics | | dailytekk0 -
Understanding Average Position in Google Anaylitics
Hello here, I have a question about the Queries report under "Search Engine Optimization" in Google Analytics: is the "Average Position" information a reliable one? I have a lot of queries that appear, from that report, to average first position, but when I verify that on Google by connecting anonymously, I can't even find my result on the first page! To me, that information is worthless and makes me think all the rest of that report is unreliable. If anyone can help me to understand it, I'd really appreciate it. Thank you in advance for any thoughts.
Reporting & Analytics | | fablau0 -
Hi - I have a beginner question about organic search results dropping to zero
Really confused about a site I'm getting going on SEO with... I'm new to SEO, but I've found that the organic search results for princessdesign.co.uk have dropped to zero dramatically. I'm concerned that I've missed something and hope that somebody out there might be able to help? Any input greatly appreciated 🙂
Reporting & Analytics | | Gokart0 -
New e-commerce launched, drop in traffic
One of our clients launched a new e-commerce site and there was a significant (60%) drop in traffic in Google Analytics following the launch. We are about 10 days into the new site, and our suspicion is that the move has caused a decrease in their site authority which has lowered their search position. The old site had the store at sitename.com/store. The new site has a Shopify store at shop.sitename.com. There were very few external followed links to the store pages, so we thought that there would be little effect for overall site traffic by moving the store to a subdomain. Any recommendations for next steps on diagnosing the problem and working towards a solution?
Reporting & Analytics | | DesignHammer0 -
Mobile redirect causing traffic drop? Can I move analytics code to capture them as visitors before redirecting them?
Yesterday I implemented a mobile redirect as I don't have a mobile version of my site. As a result I've seen a drop in traffic which makes sense as my redirect script is at the top of the page. If I were to move the redirect script below the analytics code would that allow me to still track mobile users? Would this affect my bounce rate though?
Reporting & Analytics | | SamCUK0 -
Any issues with Google impressions dropping in Webmaster Tools?
I'm seeing a drop in impressions across all my websites that are hosted at a certain location. Just wanted to make sure that it is not some reporting issue that others are seeing.
Reporting & Analytics | | tdawson090 -
Impression Drops Starting from June 2
In Webmaster Tools and the Linked Data in GA, we got huge bumps for some of our keywords this last week and subsequently were dropped from the face of the earth for other words were were tracking but not SEOing for. Basically for anything higher than 3rd page SERP, 30+ we were removed from Google search and we're no longer showing rankings for any of these words. Is this a new change as part of Penguin? I wonder b/c a lot of those words that were in the 60-100 in SERP were, as I mentioned, not focus SEO words but the backlinks were probably specific keywords, as we only have say 6 links and 4 are the same anchor text, this would put those words in the 60% over optimization penalty.
Reporting & Analytics | | Dweber0