Why would page views per visitor suddenly increase?
-
My website traffic is growing by about 1% a week. It has a fairly stable page views/visitor of about 1.69. There's normally very little variability in this As we sell an industrial product.
Today page views jumped by 50% and so did page views/visitor but visitor numbers stayed the same.
I dont have a useful hypothesis to explain this. Analytics shows me that the traffic source, country of origin and pages viewed are pretty much the same as normal. There's been no substantive change to the site (today we changed the text in a widget to link to a new page - and no one visited it). It doesn't look like 1 person has gone through the whole site as that would skew the distribution of page views by country
So why would user behavour suddenly change? I'll look at it for the rest of the week but in 7 years of looking after this website I haven't seen anything like this before.
-
If you see a sudden change in Analytics it's very often related to a problem with the tracking code. You could install the Analytics plugin for Chrome & check your pages. It could be the same visit is tracked twice - as Bill says - check the bouncerate. If this has significantly decreased it's almost certain a tracking issue.
You could check that you don't have a meta refresh or something similar which could artificially boost your page views.
Hope this helps
Dirk
-
hmm... It could be someone manually grabbing your content.... or a robot such as qualys that is visible to your analytics.
I've had both.
-
One thought is to Check your GA code, sometimes we see sites (mostly Wordpress) accidentally install the old code and new code on the same page and get wacky metrics like that. If that is the case you should see an extremely low bounce rate.
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
-
Page Performance
Not long ago, I had a couple of peers asking why I was using sessions to evaluate page performance. They said it wasn't a good metric for evaluating a single page because it only looked at how many site visitors began their journey through you site form that page. They were trying to convert me over to pageviews, which they said was a superior metric because it show you every time that page had been loaded and therefore provided better insight. Moz uses sessions on their landing page report. Is this because it's an SEO tool, so all they are concerned with is how individual URLs attract site traffic? Signed, Confused in California
Reporting & Analytics | | PGD20110 -
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 -
Enchance Ecommerce Tag Fired on every page i visit why?
Hello Experts, I have added given below code (A) on my website and given below (B) setting in GTM. Now whenever i visit the site then two tags fired that is google analytic and enchance ecommerce. GA tag fired that is fine but why enhance ecommerce tag fired even if i visit any page? I think enhane ecommerce tag should be fired when i click on addtocart right?A)```
Reporting & Analytics | | bkmitesh
dataLayer.push({ 'event':'addToCart', 'ecommerce':{ 'currencyCode':'EUR', 'add':{ // 'add' actionFieldObject measures. 'products':[{ // adding a product to a shopping cart. 'name':'Triblend Android T-Shirt', 'id':'12345', 'price':'15.25', 'brand':'Google', 'category':'Apparel', 'variant':'Gray', 'quantity':1 }] } } }); Track type : Event Event Category: `Ecommerce` Event Action: `Add to Cart` Enable Enhanced Ecommerce Features: `true` Use Data Layer: `true` Basic Settings - Document Path: `{{url path}}` Firing Rule: `{{event}}` equals `addToCart``Thanks!`0 -
When analysing my inbound anchor text am I using by page or site?
When checking to see my anchor text profile to make sure it's not too dense with the same phrases, should I be measuring against my whole site or page specific? eg if i have 100 links across my site and 20 are for the same phrase this is 20%, but if the same 20 phrases are to one page and that page has 40 links this is 55% Many thanks Ash
Reporting & Analytics | | AshShep10 -
Why are plus signs (+) suddenly showing up in Google Analytics organic search keywords reports?
Since June 13, 2013, the number of organic search queries containing a plus sign (+) has gone up over 1,000% compared to the previous period on my site in Google Analytics. These plus signs appear to be taking the place of spaces in these search queries (i.e. "word1+word2+word3"). This appears to be almost (or completely) Google organic traffic, not other search engines. Since I highly doubt searcher behavior would change so suddenly, I'm trying to figure out why Google is replacing spaces with plus signs. Is anyone else seeing this? Any ideas?
Reporting & Analytics | | RCF0 -
Viewing image search data in Analytics?
How do you view image search data in Google analytics? Do you need to apply tracking or can you drill down into the default data? Thanks.
Reporting & Analytics | | Bondara0 -
Figuring Out the Source of "direct traffic" by looking at landing page parameters
I have a client who runs an e-commerce website, and I noticed that 40% of his traffic and 25% of his sales are all attributable to Direct Traffic. At first, I tried to solve this problem by tagging all of the previously untagged links in his e-newsletter, which I expect to be very helpful. However, then I looked at the landing pages for his direct traffic, and I see that it is almost entirely filled with thousands of unique URLs that begin with a question mark followed by the name of his e-newsletter or shopping cart vendor. It would be the equivalent of having a url like the following: "www.willmarlow.com/?constantcontact=keya;sldkfjsdlfkjdf;sldkjf" If we have this amount of information in the link, shouldn't there be a way to add additional parameters to the URL to move this traffic out of the Direct column? Has anyone encountered this before? Thanks.
Reporting & Analytics | | williammarlow0 -
View entrance keyworsd for a subpage in google analytics
I have an element from ringcentral that is tracked by google analytics, yet for the life of me I cannot figure out to how to view the entrance keywords to that element. I can view the search metric and see which keywords and how many visits from each keyword onto the site in general, but how do I see which keywords were actually responsible for this 'click to call' code which has GA? I can see the total number of clicks into that code, but not which keywords led to it.
Reporting & Analytics | | ilyaelbert0