Diganosing Traffic Drop

[GLStephenJ]

With Spring Break and seasonality in play right now I'm curious about techniques for separating/diagnosing temporary drops in interest due to user behavior in a category from other things like drop in ranking or similar. How quickly can you tell these apart? Analytics will be delayed a few days for instance, other tools take time to update. What should we be looking for and when to say "ok, this too shall pass" as opposed to "did we make a bad site update" or something similar. Any tips?

[DmitriiK]

Hi there.

Well, Analytics has only couple hours delay, not days, that's where I'd look. Also even Google rankings algos have some delay, so you won't really be able to 100% see how the changes affected the positions.

Also look at past year behavior, if it's seasonal, you will see the repetitive traffic behavior in Google Analytics. Other than that I don't think there is anything to go by immediately besides intuition and experience.

Hope this helps.

[BradsDeals]

If you're using Google Analytics and have connected it to your Webmaster Console account, the quick and dirty high-level way to do this is to hit up the Queries report (Acquisition > Search Engine Optimization > Queries) and compare two time ranges. If your average position is unchanged (or up!) but your impressions are down, that would imply a change in marketplace demand. It's not perfect, but it's good for an at-a-glance gut check.

Digging deeper, I like to keep a rank checker running just for this kind of research. The rules here are basically the same as playing the stock market: Don't fuss over it every day. Set it up and leave it alone to quietly track and gather data for the day when you finally need it. I like rank trackers that check daily so I'm not fretting for a week or more over an aberrant result. The more granular data is more meaningful.

If it's not a change in rankings, it may be a change in demand. Use GA or whatever analytics suite you're using to view last year's traffic at this time next to this year's traffic. Are the spikes and dips happening at the same time every year? That's probably a natural seasonal fluctuation. You'll also be able to see roughly when you can expect traffic to rebound.

Another thing to look for in your analytics is which specific pages saw the biggest drops, and if any saw traffic increase instead. Demand doesn't always simply drop off - sometimes it shifts from one product offering to another. If it has, is there anything you can do to give it a boost?

If you don't have enough data in analytics to suss out your seasonal patterns, plug your top keywords into Google Trends and take a long view. Does search volume appear to fluctuate seasonally around the periods you're seeing it happen on your own site?

Hope that's helpful. Good luck!