Drop in direct traffic & spike in Adwords, any relation?
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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.
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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.
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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 =/
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I'd look at tracking/reporting on your end - sounds like you've got direct reporting as AdWords.
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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.
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