Can the end of a competition cause a drop in organic visitors?

[serges78]

Hi everyone,

Over the last six months I've been running a few competitions on my largest site, but noticed a very large decrease in organic sessions just after the third one ended.

For reference, the site is ~10 years old and gets a couple of million sessions per month.Organic sessions throughout last year and before the holiday periods were around 800k/month, which then increased by 50% during the holiday period alongside a competition I ran.These competitions double the pages per session and add another 1.5 minutes onto session duration.

At the end of one of the competitions this year, daily organic sessions halved overnight and are now below the baseline of last year - and not improving.

Some possible causes include;

• Google update - unlikely, because the date of the drop doesn't coincide with any increase in SERP volatility that I can find
• The extremely quick overnight drop in engagement (pages/session and session duration falling back to pre-comp baseline) caused Google to believe our site to be less popular and thus less deserving of rankings
• Visitors who've been bombarded with month-long competitions are sick of seeing them and are not searching for my site so often
• Email tagging - in the week before, UTM tracking parameters were added to all emails (of which there are a lot of subscribers) - as the number of Email visitors in Analytics increased, Organic did slightly decrease at the same time. I think this is unlikely, but I wonder if somehow some of our email visitors were previously being classed as Organic as well as some being Direct
• Incorrectly tagged as Direct - at the same time as the organic drop, Direct traffic doubled - it has since decreased back to just above the Direct baseline, however Organic has not improved

I'd just be interested to know if anyone has any experience with something similar happening and, if so, what do you think the cause was and how did you rectify it?

Thank you very much for your input in advance!

[serges78]

Thanks for the input Eric!

I've been looking into your suggestion of links being removed and it looks as though in a period of just under two weeks, we did lose about 40 referring domains - this started just before the end of the competition.

However, since then we've gained just under 200 more referring domains, so that doesn't appear to be the issue. According to Ahrefs, the number of keywords the sites ranks for did decrease around about the relevant time, but not significantly, so I wonder if it is more to do with the engagement side of things...

Would you suppose that after the increase in engagement due to the competition, visitors then get bored of using the site and decide to leave (potentially because of not winning?), causing sessions to drop down below pre-competition levels - which then might cause a decrease in the number of searchers looking for the site?
Many thanks for your help!

[GlobeRunner]

We've seen this happen with a lot of sites, especially with sites that are related certain events. For example, a 5k race or a marathon website would suffer the same fate.

It's the drop in engagement on the site, as the competition is over so visitors have no need to go to the site anymore. Also, the site may have lost links pointing to the site. The site owner pointing links to you figured the competition was over so they removed the links.

I would take a look at the links to the site and look at the historical links (using Majestic.com) or see if you have a list of links from previous link evaluations--crawl those links and see if any of them have changed or been removed. If they have, you may be able to see if you can get those links back.