My direct traffic went up and my organic traffic went down. Help!
-
So on Oct. 21, our direct traffic increased 3x and our organic traffic decreased 3x. And it has been that way ever since. Almost like they flip flopped. Additionally, that was the same day I started retargeting to our site. I have tagged all the links from the ads and they're being counted as google paid clicks in GA. And our accounts are linked. I am just dumbfounded as to how this could happen.
-
Hey Arnold Ambiel,
cheguei a esse tópico porque estava tendo um problema como o seu. O tráfego orgânico e direto foram revertidos. Vi que você tinha esse problema em 2016 e o meu ocorreu em junho.
Você encontrou alguma solução para esse problema? -
haven't checked yet but did find this article about serp sitelink changes on the exact day i saw traffic drop.
-
Awh, shucks! Thanks for the kind words!
I look forward to seeing what you find! Let me know if I can help any further!
Regards,
Trenton -
It's contributions like Trenton's above that make me love the Moz community. I will check all that you suggested and report back.
-
I'm going to chime in here as the conversation has already started from which I want to reference a few items.
While Sean is correct that there is a redirect on page load, - which is weird & not likely optimal - the redirect isn't causing the UTM parameters to be dropped here.
If you check the Network tab of the debug console of Chrome you'll see the two requests for the URI you listed above. If you click the requested file (in the network tab) & navigate to the 'Headers' tab you will see that Query String Parameters are still there & being passed.
Now let's circle back to the original problem & see if we can't get to the bottom of it!I checked out the graph you linked and while it does seem that there's an inverse correlation there, I wouldn't assume too quickly that they switched. I would encourage you to dive into the data a little bit more. Specifically:
-
I would use Google Search Console's Search Analytics (the actual interface, not the section in Google Analytics) & look to see if the number of clicks around that same time changed much.
-
If there is a noticeable change, dive into the keywords & Landing Pages that saw the shift
-
If there is not a noticeable change, we can cross an actual organic change off our list.
-
I would also look at the change over that period in GA's landing page report. Look to see if there are any pages that saw a gain/loss over the period in question.
-
If there is, add a secondary dimension of medium & see where the change lies
-
If not, mark it off
-
The final door I would check is the changes that were made for remarketing
-
What if any changes were made within Google Analytics? Specifically the admin portion, while I'd check all changes you may have made here, I'm specifically curious if you may have added the URL Query Parameters as exclusions?
-
Were any tags, tracking codes, etc added during this time & are the implementations correct?
If you dive into these and summarize your findings here, I'll be more than happy to help you further. Though, I have a hunch that the answer is behind one of these doors.
Good luck!
Trenton -
-
thought i'd add the GA graph that shows the switch
-
so would a JS redirect make the session count as direct traffic?
-
Hey,
It looks like there was a JS redirect in place that redirects users to a fresh page view of the same page - don't know if this might be something having an effect?
I used Ayima Redirect Tool for chrome to find this - see the screenshot attached.
Hope this helps,
Sean
-
Thanks Sean!
Here is the final URL:
http://www.oneworldplayproject.com/buy-bulk-soccer-balls/?utm_medium=cpc&utm_source=google&utm_campaign=bulk&utm_content=bulk10&utm_term=300Here is the URL in the ad that people could type in. This is a redirect to the www. version:
oneworldplayproject.comAlso, these are only image ads so there is no display URL being shown.
I am also curious why Organic would drop though. But let's play this out first.
-
Hi there,
Although you say you've tagged your ad traffic correctly, it sounds like your UTM tracking isn't set up correctly - 95% of the time wrong tracking from ads forces a sudden unnatural increase in Direct traffic. The other possibility is that you're sending traffic to a page that's then redirecting to your site which may trim off the UTM tagging and force the traffic as 'Direct'.
Give me an example of one of the URLs you've tagged up and I'll see if anything is going wrong.
All the best,
Sean
-
direct traffic can be from bookmarks and such, as well as it could depend on proper implementation of ads and retargetting too.
That does seem a bit odd of a coincidence though, I have never dealt with such a switch scenario like that and to that degree, I have only seen more negligible or at least less worrisome amount of such changes in the past which we ended up not spending time to find out what was the underlying sitch with it as it corrected itself as a trend after a short period of time.
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
-
Should I delete all tags and just use my categories to organize content?
My website NorthernCaliforniaHikingTrails.com/blog has 400 or so tags, and it also has an extensive set of categories. I'm thinking about deleting all the tags, but keeping the categories and consolidating them a bit. Is there a significant SEO advantage to having tags in my case? I've seen a few very high-ranking websites actually rank for a tag, but I doubt my site will reach that level. Any help appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | John88990 -
Big problems with site traffic
Hello! I have big problems with website promotion. It's been 7 months and the attendance on the site is 1-5 people a day. I do not understand the reason. Can you tell me what I'm doing wrong? Site: www.azartlist.com Many thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bobic1 -
Can anyone help me clean up my link profile?
Hi, I've been struggling with my rankings for some 18 months or so. It seems like the plan is to review my back links and remove or disavow the ones that could be causing my site problems. Unfortunately I neither have the time or expertise to perform this task and wonder if there are any freelancers who could work on this project? I look forward to hearing from anyone.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Aikijeff0 -
Site Search Results in Index -- Help
Hi, I made a mistake on my site, long story short, I have a bunch of search results page in the Google index. (I made a navigation page full of common search terms, and made internal links to a respective search results page for each common search term.) Google crawled the site, saw the links and now those search results pages are indexed. I made versions of the indexed search results pages into proper category pages with good URLs and am ready to go live/ replace the pages and links. But, I am a little unsure how to do it /what the effects can be: Will there be duplicate content issues if I just replace the bad, search results links/URLs with the good, category page links/URLs on the navi. page? (is a short term risk worth it?) Should I get the search results pages de-indexed first and then relaunch the navi. page with the correct category URLs? Should I do a robots.txt disallow directive for search results? Should I use Google's URL removal tool to remove those indexed search results pages for a quick fix, or will this cause more harm than good? Time is not the biggest issue, I want to do it right, because those indexed search results pages do attract traffic and the navi. page has been great for usability. Any suggestions would be great. I have been reading a ton on this topic, but maybe someone can give me more specific advice. Thanks in advance, hopefully this all makes sense.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | IOSC1 -
Home Page Got Indexed as httpS and Rankings Went Down.
Hello fellow SEO's About 3 weeks ago all of a sudden the home page on our Magento based website went down in rankings (from top 10 to page 3-4 Google) and was showing as httpS - instead of usual http. It first happened with just a few keywords and a week later any search phrase was returning the httpS result for the home page. When I view cache for the home page now it (both http and httpS versions) it gives me this http://clip2net.com/s/2OtPS We are not blocking anything in robots.txt Robots tags are set to index,follow There are hardly any external links pointing at the home pages as httpS This only affected the home page - all other pages rank where they used to and appear as http Has anybody ever had a similar problem? Thanks in advance for your thoughts and help
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ddseo0 -
Massive drop in organic rankings - but strange issues
Hi guys, We experienced a massive drop in organic rankings on Saturday 29 October, a drop of around 80%.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cashchampion
I have received no notifications in webmaster tools
The site still ranks for its name so we are not banned
The site has been around since 2007
My mozrank and trustrank are very high (higher than sites that now still rank while we don't)
The strange this is the homepage doesn't rank for the main keyword (which it always did), but now a deeper page ranks for the main keyword, albeit on page 4.
Quite a few of our sites were affected, even though they target different industries, different countries, with different hosts, different unique content, different links (for one we havent even started link building and it was getting 250 UV per day, and now 8). I am completely confused by this.
Any advice or direction would be extremely helpful. Thanks so much0 -
My traffic dropped over 60% - was I penalized?
Hi all, We launched a major update of our site in the middle of June. We have lots of pages and were indexed very quickly, and started ranking well for long tail terms. Last week, our organic traffic suddenly dropped over 60% as our pages started ranking much lower. One issue we discovered was that our site was responding to all subdomains, not just www, and Google did seem to be crawling two alternate subdomains -- Webmaster Tools shows crawl activity, but no pages indexed on these. We fixed that problem a couple days ago (all subdomains 301 to the www). Is that something that would have caused a sudden drop like we saw? This would have been an issue since the relaunch, though one of the subdomains only started getting crawled (~1,000 pages/day) in August. We have investigated a few other things that may have been a factor: We sent out a press release via iReach a few weeks ago which makes up the majority of our recent backlinks. Our site occasionally returns a 502 no gateway error when under heavy load, Google sees this 3-10 times at day. GA shows a page load spike the day before the drop, but we had worse spikes in the past that did not seem to have an impact. Did we just get lucky with a "honeymoon" phase with Google? This is the site: http://goo.gl/3DCbl Indexing continues -- we now have over 500k pages indexed and Google is crawling faster than ever, about 30,000 pages per day. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tact0 -
Do you think that google places have influence on organic search?
Hi everyone, Do you think that google places have influence on organic search? i mean if you are on google places with your companies, your ranking must be better for that query? isn't it ? if you agree with me i'll bring you this stange case: my clients has a company profile on google places but it is only fourth on the organic results for that query and his competitor is ranked first with: no google places profile no authority and no company in the city ( in fact it is not in the city but 30 miles far ) the query is "poltrona frau brescia" poltrona frau= name of the company brescia= city in wich the company is located thanks poltrona-frau-brescia
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | guidoboem0