Referral Traffic from Google
-
Hello, I have a question about my company's new website. I've worked in SEO and studied Google Analytics results for a few years now but have never really come across something like this.
I started in this position in January of this year and when I started breaking down the traffic sources in Google Analytics, I noticed most of the traffic was coming from Google.com as a referral source. I had never seen Google.com as a referral source before so I looked into options for what it could be. It was not a paid ad and our organic traffic was coming through in Analytics, Before I could get any further, our new website was launched (we switched CRM's to WordPress) and the referral traffic from google went from 2,966 in January of 2015 to 22 in February 2015. for more comparison, in February of 2014, the referral traffic from Google was 2,496.
I expected a drop when we switched CRM's but we correctly re-directed all pages and created a new sitemap and our organic traffic is up since the switch (not enough to cover drop in referral). I thought at first this had to do with our Google sellers account being de-activated when we made the switch, but I quickly fixed this over a month ago and no change.
I'm wondering if anyone has ever seen Google.com come through as a referral source in Google Analytics and if they we're able to figure out what it actually was. This would be a great help!
Thank you,
Alex
-
Not saying that is it 100% but that could be a major part of the issue. I would talk with the agency running the PPC and let them know the issue and have them pair the AdWords and Analytics accounts.
-
No, unfortunately not. We are an agency, however the client has hired someone else to run their PPC campaign so we don't have their campaign data linked to GA.
-
Hmmm, is your adwords account hooked up to your analytics account?
Can you click into the results going to the homepage and set that secondary dimension to country? That should be a possibility, a location of some kind.
-
Hi Kate, yes there are 1,374 sessions.
Half of them are going to the homepage "/"
Then there are around 350 going to promo single URL pages from PPC campaigns (so I understand the reason for those).
Around 100 are going to the "About Us" and "contact us" pages. Could these be ad extensions?
-
Is there much traffic coming in this way? The above would suggest the referral is from the google.co.uk homepage, is not passing the referral page, or is from something internal as /url isn't a thing. I've seen all of this before, so you are not going nuts, but I don't have a concise answer. I can tell you that your search traffic should be going to organic and this should be something like news, images, or another google property. Most likely it's traffic that is blocking referral info.
So I am hoping it's not much traffic. Where is the traffic going? Set that secondary dimension to landing page and let me know.
-
Hi Kate,
I found this forum stream - we're having a similar situation. I tried your suggestion. Our top referrer is Google.co.uk. When I add the secondary dimension "Full Referrer" It says:
1. "/" google.co.uk/
2. "(not set)" google.co.uk
3. "/url" google.co.uk/url
-
My answer was going to be much like Dirks. There are some Google properties that send traffic as referral, not as search. Can you take a look at the referral traffic from google.com and add "Full Referrer" as a Secondary Dimension and let us know what that is?
-
Thanks for help DC! I looked into both your suggestions, and our image search has dropped but not nearly enough to account for the drop in traffic and I looked into where most of the referral traffic from Google was coming from and it was the US.
Anyone else have any ideas on where the referral traffic from Google would have been coming from and why it dropped off the face of the earth with the new site when everything else has gone up?
Thank you!
-
In countries where the "old" image search is still used (like Germany) - it is counted as Referral traffic rather than search traffic (not sure why). You could check in Webmastertools what your % of image search is (and compare January & February)
You could also try to check the landing pages report for this referral traffic and compare this with the landingpages in Acquisition >Search Engine Optimisation > Landingpages with secondary dimension "Google Property"
rgds,
Dirk
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
-
Referral Data Q's
1. We recently ran a promotion on both FB and Reddit, which is https, linking to our non-https site. We utilized UTM links to our landing page. Our GA campaign data returned extremely low hits in comparison to what we actually received (and recorded via FB/Reddit dashboard). Obviously our Direct traffic spiked during these times, caused by a secure to nonsecure referral, I'm sure. I'm also noticing a spike in referral traffic from lm.facebook.com that correlates to the ad times. Does this mean Facebook's link shim is stripping away my UTM data? My question is why we receive SOME properly UTM-tagged referral traffic in our campaigns? What's allowing some of it to go through? 2. I've tagged our email signature links with UTM as well, hoping to clean up some of our Direct traffic. I understand that external clients like Outlook and Thunderbird likely won't pass referral data, but do hosted clients like Gmail, Yahoo, and such? And if so, would the https to http difference obstruct this again? I'd love some insight onto these questions, especially if I'm off the mark with a few of my assumptions there.
Reporting & Analytics | | kirmeliux0 -
How to see organic traffic only?
Im having trouble separating our organic traffic vs our PPC. When I go into Analytics>Traffic>Sources>Search>Organic, its giving me numbers that are not accurate. I believe whats happening is that its not able to distinguish our bing organic/ppc. Is using Webmaster tools Search Queries a more accurate way to determine organic search volume?
Reporting & Analytics | | DemiGR0 -
Google traffic plummeted on Sunday - what can I do?
On Sunday, my google traffic plummeted. I was getting 320 hits a day from Google on my best days - my site is just about to turn 3 months old so I was thrilled with that. On Sunday it was 110 and I think it is getting worse. Edit: Yep, yesterday was 65. Google Webmasters shows the drop today. One day, my impressions were 5,500 and the next just 1,000. Yikes. My traffic is so depressing now after so much hard work. Is this Google Panda? What can I do? I have no idea why this happened. I am getting several quality backlinks a week, sometimes a day.
Reporting & Analytics | | 2bloggers0 -
Is Google analytics not working properly anymore?
Hi mozzers, We launched a website 2 months ago and when monitoring Organic data on GA we had an average of 23% bounce rate like a month ago but the last 2 weeks I noticed that bounce rate=0%. This is very weird especially that we haven't modified the existing pages and that multiple keywords show an average site duration of 0 seconds. Any thoughts about this discrepancy? Do you think that there is an issue with the GATC implemented? Thanks
Reporting & Analytics | | Ideas-Money-Art0 -
How Google handles keywords and punctuation?
How does Google handle punctuation of keywords within its search? If I have three keywords together, but on the site there is a question mark between them, does Google ignore the question mark? Or should I think of a new way of writing the content so Google likes it more? And would this apply with articles (a, the, etc) and prepositions such as (in, of, etc.)? Thanks a lot.
Reporting & Analytics | | Rocket.Fuel1 -
Google analytics advanced segments
Ok, I need help with a simple (although, for some reason, I'm having trouble with it) advanced segment. Dilemma**:** All of our techs have a backend cookie that they use to log into our website. I want a way toexclude all visites where the landing page contained this in the url:/backend/cookie.php?username= Advanced Segment: We have a lot of techs and each one of them has a different "username=example". So how can I set up an advanced segment where it will exclude any visit where the visitor came in one a landing page containing /backend/cookie.php?username=
Reporting & Analytics | | NerdsOnCall0 -
Does Google Analytics use your data against you?
I couldn't find this question answered anywhere in Q&A, so I apologize if it's a duplicate of another post. I heard, about a year ago on either Web Pro World, or Warrior Forum that Google uses your visitor data in your Google Analytic account to rank your site. Someone said that when they took out the Google code, their site went from the third to the first page within 48 hours. That was then verified over the next couple of weeks by others. Their thought was that regardless of the optimized page and incoming link, if the site wasn't getting visitors, then it would be penalized. Since Google has the data, they would be able to use it. I then started using another, paid, solution - getclicky.com. While I like clicky, there is some info Google has that clicky doesn't, everyone integrates with Google analytics - like SEOmoz, and I'm paying a monthly fee. Now that I'm a part of a community of experts, what do you think? Have you noticed Google ranking you based on your analytics data? Has anyone experienced this, or heard about it before? Because I'd like to go back to using Google analytics. Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | DallasBonsai0 -
Mobile and Google Analytics
As my mobile numbers are going up in Google Analytics I'm trying to figure out what phone runs what browser. I see that 93% of mobile users have Safari which I believe is iPhone, iPad and iPods. There is a 6% usage of "Mozilla Compatible Agent". What cell phone would this be?
Reporting & Analytics | | LabadieAuto0