Can the end of a competition cause a drop in organic visitors?
-
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!
-
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! -
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.
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
-
Mobile first indexing but can you force Google to index your desktop url instead?
Hi Guys So I just wanted to know if there is an option to force google to index your desktop version instead of the mobile version after the mobile first indexing by Google. Cheers Martin
Reporting & Analytics | | martin19700 -
How to uncover GA "Not Provided" organic keywords?
Hello, Google Analytics has a lot of keywords which are tagged as "Not Provided" So how can i uncover what these are? Otherwise how do i know which organic keywords are doing well or not?
Reporting & Analytics | | Riz_Khan0 -
Hello, our domain authority dropped significantly overnight from 37 to 29\. We have been building good links from high DA pages and producing quality, regular content.
Hello, our domain authority dropped significantly overnight from 37 to 29. We have been building good links from high DA sites and producing regular, good quality content. Anyone able to offer any ideas why? Thanks
Reporting & Analytics | | ProMOZ1231 -
Can you arrange Google Analytics source/medium traffic by percentage change?
I'm doing a year to year traffic audit for a client. I would like to analyze Google Analytics source/medium traffic by percent change. Is there a way to do this? Do I have to create a custom variable? 9BH70RO
Reporting & Analytics | | VanguardCommunications0 -
Domain Authority Drop
We just witnessed a domain authority drop. We went from 24 to 21.Not sure why. We've been creating fresh new content for our site over the last few days and haven't done anything that would cause it.
Reporting & Analytics | | StickyLife
Any advice would be greatly appreciated.0 -
How can I use Google Analytics to detect users viewing my website on a TV?
I want to see in Google Analytics whether or not people are viewing my website on a TV, such as with a smart TV or other device connected to their TV. These are the only ways to do this that I have found so far: Operating system: Google TV, Nintendo Wii, Playstation 3, Xbox Browser: Nintendo Browser, Playstation 3 Are there other data points that I can reliably use to segment these users?
Reporting & Analytics | | RCF0 -
Changed URL's, traffic dropped from 2k week to 1K week. Need advice!
Hi Mozers, I recently changed my URLs for my ecommerce site and my traffic went from 2,000 visitors a week to 1,000 visitors a week, over a 3 week period. Traffic is down, so are unique Kwds. I need advice on why this happened and what I should do moving forward. To brief, I have a ecommerce website, www.ecustomfinishes.com. I noticed pattern that a lot of my URLs with a unique URL structure (URL.Com/ProductDescription/ProductName) were getting a lot of entrances ~30-50 a month, and others that followed the path of my subcategory (URL.com/SubCat/Product) were getting 0-3 entrances a month. The seo pattern was that those with unique product URLs were hitting long tail Kwds, and those URLs with /subcategory/product were getting far less traffic. I changed 150 or so urls to be unique. Good idea, I thought. Since then: CON: Since then my traffic dropped from 2200 visitors a week to 1100 visitors a week. -25% week to week, over 3 weeks CON: # of non-paid keywords sending visits: -25% week to week, over 3 weeks PRO: my Urls receiving entrances +10% week to week, over 3 weeks REF: http://imgur.com/GwZT8 Question: What are your best suggestions moving forward? Any advice is much appreciated, Thank you!!! abBN3
Reporting & Analytics | | longdenc_gmail.com0 -
Why is a section of our website dropping in&out of Google SERPs?
In July 2011 we started a news section that has it's own 'subfolder' /news/ (http://www.chorder.com/news/new_gear/, http://www.chorder.com/news/gear_deals/ etc.) The whole news section is dropping in&out of Google SERP's since late October, as show in attached graph. All news texts are real deal, written by our own staff, linked from homepage. Any idea why this happens and how to prevent it? cmqky.png
Reporting & Analytics | | imventurer0