Drop in direct traffic & spike in Adwords, any relation?
-
So I noticed a significant (around 50%) drop in Direct traffic in analytics to one of my websites (compared to last month). I've also noticed a spike in Adwords for around the same number of sessions. The drop in traffic is pretty much isolated to one specific page, and it is the same page involved in the spike in Adwords.
Is it possible that Google was not recognizing a portion of the Adwords traffic? That's the only theory I have, but we haven't changed anything with their tracking or Adwords, so I'm a little hesitant to go with that theory.
-
If it's for the same page, and you're seeing the inverse relationship, then it is very probable that adwords has replaced your mobile organic listing. I would double check your search query report and negative keywords and mobile bids to ensure that google hasn't just started associating your pages to different keywords.
-
That particular website doesn't rank for any major terms, so I don't think it's got anything to do with organic rank...
The UA code looks correct on the page....is there any else that would cause it to track improperly? Absolutely nothing has been changed on the site or in the adwords campaign...I just don't know what would cause it to suddenly change the way it's tracking =/
update: I looked a little deeper into analytics and it looks like they actually are down by around 23% for returning visits (although not specifically isolated to the adwords page). They're also down by about 22% for mobile, compared to almost no change for desktop. The mobile drop is primarily associated with the adwords page.
Offline, we've actually increased billboard/poster advertising, so it wouldn't make sense for direct traffic to drop there either.
This is frustrating, I think it has something to do with mobile/adwords tracking, but I can't find anything out of the ordinary =/
-
I'd look at tracking/reporting on your end - sounds like you've got direct reporting as AdWords.
-
What keywords are you bidding on? It could be that you are ranking for the same phrase in both paid and organic and people are just clicking on your PPC ad rather than your organic listing.
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
-
Google analytics : exclude traffic to a subdomain
Hi, I have a website with a client access on a subdomain. I want to exclude the traffic to that subdomain because it messes up my conversion goal for the main site. Per example, 2 out of 10 visitors are existing clients that want to access to my SaaS product. The 8 other are potential clients. I want to exclude the 2 clients from my stats so I could have the good conversion percentage for my free trial for the other 8 potential clients. Thanks in advance for your help!
Reporting & Analytics | | slestage0 -
Hour of the day that my analytics goals are being triggered within the all traffic report.
I am trying to identify the hour of the day that particular keywords (organic and PPC) are triggering my goals. Ideally I'd like to be able to use the all traffic report with the secondary dimension set as keyword. Hopefully I'm missing something simple, thanks all. Mark
Reporting & Analytics | | mde9110 -
Why am i still seeing very recent organic kw traffic being reported in Analytics if G is now fully encrypted ?
Why am i still seeing very recent organic kw traffic being reported in Analytics if G is now fully encrypted ? Should it not all be 'Not Provided' now ? When this fully roles out if not already wont it be impossible to distinguish between brand and non brand kw ? Cheers Dan
Reporting & Analytics | | Dan-Lawrence1 -
Does Audience Overview in goole analytics contain visits from adwords.
Hi everyone I set up a new adwords account for a company and according to adwords we received 700 hits to the site but none showed up in analytics and no enquiries were made. Now the two accounts (adwords and analytics) weren't connected at the time but I should have been able to see the increased visits in analytics anyway as it was a very new site and had no real traffic yet. Someone at Google repeatedly told me that "Audience Overview" (unique visitors) doesn’t include adwords visits only organic traffic. Is this right? Maybe I'm wrong but I always thought it included everything well an estimation anyway. If anyone could help that would be great as it seems a little fishy. Many Thanks,
Reporting & Analytics | | digital.moretogether.com0 -
Traffic Down for Most Referrers - not just Google
Our traffic has taken a severe hit, over the past 3 weeks - down about 60%, which I had assumed was caused by the Penguin update. However on closer inspection of our analytics, our traffic is is down by between 30 and 50% for nearly all our referrers - including Bing and other search engines, referring sites, and even direct traffic! Google provides the vast majority of our traffic, so in terms of the absolute visitor count, the drop in Google traffic has the biggest effect - by some distance. But the fact that traffic is down by similar percentages suggest that Penguin isn't the cause of our troubles at all. We sell garden products in the UK, and it's just coming into peak season. Last year, May was one of our top months, External conditions - such as the very wet weather over the past month, economic gloom and doom - don't begin to explain this sudden and dramatic drop in traffic. We are very perplexed. If anyone has any bright ideas, I'd be interested to hear them. Ben
Reporting & Analytics | | atticus70 -
Drop in google referral traffic
Hi guys, As we know, GA shows google as traffic source in two ways: google / organic for organic searches and google.TLD / referral for everything else: google groups, base.google.com, static pages, google reader, google image search, google search appliance/mini. What we noticed is that around Oct 20th there's a huge drop of google.TLD / referral traffic to our site. Do you experience something similar? I couldn't find anything Google-related that happened around this specific date. We use GSA for our site search and I'm wondering if this could be the reason - maybe someone from our development team made changes to GSA settings that affected this traffic source. Looking forward to hearing from you! Thanks.
Reporting & Analytics | | lgrozeva0 -
GA dropping source due to 3rd party checkout?
So I am trying to track ecommerce transactions on a Prostores site and GA is dropping the source because the checkout is on prostores domain instead of the store domain. All ecommerce transactions show a source of the actual website as a referral. I've read googles documentation on tracking across multiple domains but just can't quite get it right. Can anyone help me out? Here is my tracking code: ss:commentdo nothing</ss:comment>
Reporting & Analytics | | BlinkWeb0