Traffic drop after analytics troubles
-
Hi
For two weeks we had an artifical low bouncerate & high pageviews/visit in our Analytics reporting. The day we corrected the bug in Analytics - our bouncerate & pageviews/visit returned to normal levels - however we saw our search traffic go down massively(-50% in sessions).
The bug in the Analytics was caused by a second Analytics tag which was included in an external script which interfered with our own tag. The drop in traffic occurred just after the removal of the second script (which was only on our site for two weeks). We didn't touch our own tagging - and there were no technical changes on the site during this period, and there is no seasonal trend which could explain the sudden drop of traffic. We double checked our tagging - and the analytics tag is present & working on all the pages of our site.
On the organic traffic report from analytics you can clearly see the when the troubles with analytics started & ended (artificial low bounce rate) - and that the traffic drop starts right after the reporting issue ended. Webmastertools also indicated a lower number of views/clicks, but not to the massive 50% drop.
Is it possible that Google uses the measurements from Analytics for it's SERP's? Or should there be another reason, and where should we start looking? Appreciate your help!
-
To be honest - I knew the media agency did a change - so I thought the script was removed. Checking the source again shows that they still have the tracking tag - but with a modified tracking code - the modified script is here http://bit.ly/1qmtdWg - our site is http://bit.ly/1D0weRQ
I don't see interference on the measurements, but if I look at the Google Analytics reference, I'm not sure if this is the proper way to implement two tracking codes on a page, but I am in not really an expert in javascript or advanced analytics configuraton.
-
Pageviews will double and bounce rates will drop any time you have two tracking codes on a page (each pageview is seen as two, thus automatically making it not a bounce). Did you just remove the extra Analytics tag, or get rid of the whole script?
-
It was a script from the company which is selling the ads on the site (a medium sized media agency in Germany). It included a Google Analytics tag from another account - which was called during the loading of the page. Not sure if it was the script itself, or the way it was called, but there certainly was interference. I noticed using the Analytics tag assistant that the tag which was used was not ours, and when the page was loaded it first became green (our tag), than blue, and then green again (external tag).
Direct result of the script was that time on page dropped dramatically, but pageviews/visit doubled & bouncerate was cut in half.
-
It doesn't look like a coincidence to me either; I just don't think it is a direct correlation of the increased bounce rate and the decreased traffic. What was that external script that added the extra Analytics code?
-
The (search) traffic didn't increase when the problem with analytics started (of course the page views did) - as you can see in the graph. There is a drop the moment the stats (bounce rate & page views/visit) change in the negative sense.
Quite possible it's a coincidence, and that something else is causing the drop, but I don't really see what it could be.
-
I would think that if one could substantially increase the traffic of a site by artificially decreasing bounce/increasing pageviews using a second code, we'd see a lot of double-tagged sites out there...
-
Always possible - however we never did any linkbuilding, and we never used external SEO agencies that could have done it. The link profile seems pretty normal, no links from spammy domains like blogger, blogspot, or other fishy domains.
The profile is quite comparable with similar sites within our company, and we don't see any changes at this date on any of the other sites.
-
It's probably more correlated with the Penguin 3.0 refresh that have been rolling out. I'm guessing that it's just a coincidence w/the GA issue.
-
Thanks - will check the weblogs as well.
I know that the normally there should not be a link between Analytics & SERP's - but it's the second time that I notice that a glitch in Analytics is linked to a sudden drop in traffic so I am getting a bit suspicious about it (the previous time was on another site 2 years ago)
-
According to Matt Cutts, the use of GA doesn't hurt/help your site in rankings. Do you have access to your web logs? If so, do an analysis there and see if it replicates what you saw on GA.
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
-
How can I distinguish new visitors from existing (customers) in Google Analytics to attain an avg # of new visitor traffic per day/week?
i do marketing for a business software site where we have hundreds of clients and each account has on avg 100 users. I am having a very challenging time to attempting to figure out the real number of unique traffic that our site receives. **(what's creating the issue is that we have thousands of user accounts where our users log-in via our site to access our app/platform). Would love help with this! Christian
Reporting & Analytics | | Sundance_Kidd0 -
Google Analytics View Filters
Using the same GA property, I would like to set up three filtered views: 1. Tracking across one subdomain and one primary domain (example: shop.example.com & example.com) 2. Track only primary domain (example.com) 3. Track only subdomain (shop.example.com) Can this be achieved by using view filters? If so, how do they need to be set? Also, according to this article: https://moz.com/blog/cross-domain-subdomain-tracking-in-google-analytics, with cross domain tracking, I need to ignore self-referrals, which can only be done at the property level. If set up to ignore example.com referrals, will this cause problems with filter 2 and 3?
Reporting & Analytics | | Evan340 -
Cross domain tracking Google Analytics
Hi there, Got a question on cross domain tracking: We have a couple of TLD's to serve localized content to our visitors, next to our main .com TLD where our app is running as well in a subdomain. Situation is this: Local sites:
Reporting & Analytics | | jorisbrabants
marketingsite.be
marketingsite.com.br
marketingsite.fr Main site: marketingsite.com
app.marketingsite.com Conversion gets triggered when somebody ends up in app.marketingsite.com/firstuse for example. People can sign up at the local site filling in their email but they end up in app.marketingsite.com/firstuse Reading this article on cross domain tracking I'm getting a bit confused on the setup of the tracking code itself. The sample code provided shows these two lines: ga('require', 'linker'); ga('linker:autoLink', ['maindomain.com','targetdomain.com']); Now the question 🙂 Is it correct when I think that maindomain should be replaced with our local TLD's on every one of those, and that targetdomain is where the conversion happens? In this case the .com site?0 -
Google Analytics for User Experience
Hi In terms of looking at the overall User Experience of a website is there any particular areas of Google analytics that you believe to be particularly useful to identify areas of worry or opportunity?
Reporting & Analytics | | TheZenAgency1 -
Regular Expressions in Google Analytics
Hi All I've been struggling to create a regular expression for a Google Analytics goal step that would match the following: ^/specifictextstring/anytextstring/anytextstring/
Reporting & Analytics | | Cabbagefeet
^/specifictextstring/anytextstring/ However I don't want it to match any URLs that end with: /anytextstring**_**phonecall or /phonecall, for example: /specifictextstring/anytextstring/anytextstring/anytextstring**phonecall
/specifictextstring/anytextstring/anytextstring**phonecall
/specifictextstring/anytextstring/anytextstring/phonecall
/specifictextstring/anytextstring/phonecall Does anyone have any ideas? Thanks in advance for all contributions.0 -
Why have my impressions dropped?
Hello, I have various different accounts for a range of websites on Google analytic's and on a few of my accounts the impressions seem to have dramatically dropped from January 2014. Does anyone know what could of caused the drops, could to do with an algorithm? I am racking my brains trying to figure out why the drop so suddenly. All help would be greatly received. thank you! Beth
Reporting & Analytics | | cmuknbb0 -
Big Traffic Drops in Bing
I have a client that has been struggling with their organic traffic the over the past several months. We figured they had been hit by Penguin and some of Google's other algo changes...But I just dug in a little deeper in Google Analytics, and their traffic is actually up year over year for Google organic, but they are down 75% + for both Bing and Yahoo organic. They drop seemed to occur around April, 2012, and they have rapidly lost Bing and Yahoo traffic ever since. Can anyone help explain why this might be happening? A Bing and Yahoo algo update? Or just fewer people using those search engines possibly? I'm not quite sure how to make up for all the lost traffic in Bing and Yahoo. Any suggestions are appreciated!
Reporting & Analytics | | BlueTent200 -
What are your top 5 Analytics Reports?
What are for you the 5 most important reports into Google Analytics? Thank you for yours answers guys, Jonathan Leplang
Reporting & Analytics | | JonathanLeplang0