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
-
Phantom search results showing up in analytics
Hi, I'm getting these weird phantom search results showing up in my analytics account which is skewing my results. I have a wordpress site, and I do have some custom search results pages, but analytics is telling me these hits are coming from google- which I doubt. The end of the query string (&cat=plus-5-results) is not coming from a link created within my site. Anyone have any ideas? Failing that, would somebody be kind enough to explain how I can ignore these hits, but retain other, valid search result requests? Thanks reading! Will Screenshot%202019-05-16%20at%2022.32.10.jpg
Reporting & Analytics | | madegood0 -
Huge Analytics discrepancy when I turned off Analytics Module & Turned on GA via GTM
Hello, I was running universal GA via a GA Drupal module. We setup Google Tag Manager and setup a GA tag to run through GTM. When we pushed the GTM container live our Real Time was at around 1900 and when we turned off the Drupal module the Real Time was reporting around 1100. After 24 hours the sessions for that day were about 100k lower than what they usually are. Any ideas Why the larger discrepancy? Any places that are obvious to look? *I didn't setup the original Drupal GA module, nor do I know who did. Thanks
Reporting & Analytics | | JJLWeber0 -
How can I tell if I am using Universal Analytics?
On my Google Analytics page it says at the top "Upgrade to Universal Analytics Upgrade to get a deeper understanding of your users through new tools and more accurate data." Below that it talks about how to do it. I do not see what they are talking about for "Select an account and a property, then click Universal Analytics Upgrade." But if I can into my change history is shows Changed By-System Property "http://www123.com" started transfer to Universal Analytics processing." This was on May 22nd and it hasn't said anything since. Why does it keep telling me to do it if it already has? It doesn't say transfer complete anywhere so I don't know if it finished or not.
Reporting & Analytics | | EcommerceSite0 -
Goal tracking in Google Analytics
Hi folks I read from various sources that if you setup goals in Google Analytics each of these goals can only be fulfilled once per visit. Also some sources suggesting that only one goal from each goal group can be fulfilled per visit. On our site we have a goal for external links since this provides value to partners. Some users do open an external link in a new tab, then come back to the main site. Any further goal completions would then not get tracked. Since we apply a result based payment model for our work this means we are literally loosing money. Anyone has official info from Google on this? Can it be configured? How long is a visit? Thanks a million and have a great day. Fredrik
Reporting & Analytics | | Resultify0 -
SEO traffic had significantly dropped
I know this question has been asked before, but I'm hoping someone can address my specific issue. We recently did a complete redesign of our site and moved it over to a new server. The site was even "down" for about a week, where we had a static splash page. However since relaunching (it's not been over two weeks) we've seen a significant drop in search engine traffic. We are using Yoast for Wordpress. The site is The Tech Block. Could anyone see if there is something we're doing wrong? Thanks
Reporting & Analytics | | ttb0 -
No Social Sources in Google Analytics - what am I doing wrong?
Hello Everyone, I'm having a strange issue: I DO NOT have in my Google Analytics the "Social" tab under the Traffic Sources category. Look at the first image of this post: http://marketingland.com/google-analytics-social-reports-8138 How do you "get" that to show? Hope somebody has this issue and can help, Thanks a lot, Alex
Reporting & Analytics | | pwpaneuro0 -
Track image searches on google analytics
How can i track image searches on google analytics? To filter the refferers by image.google or /imgres does not work in new google analytics (and brings an impossibly small number on old GA). also, this would not cover local google image refferers, that don't come from image.google.com. anyone knows how to find image search sources? i haven't found anything helpful in google's documentation or forums. thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | zeepartner0 -
Analytics bounce rate change
Hi mozzers, I have a little riddle. A few weeks ago the bounce rate on one of our website dropped 90% - from 45 % average to 5 % average. We haven't changed much in the code of the site, layout or anything else. The traffic is pretty stable too. Anyone can guess why? Or have experienced something similar? xOvrb.jpg
Reporting & Analytics | | ThomasHgenhaven0