Has anyone noticed a dramatic drop in direct visits year over year in GA across multiple sites?
-
I monitor about 10 websites in GA. Many of these sites are in a stable phase of their lifecycle. I've noticed this year that direct visits on all my sites and even friends sites have dropped by 20-60%. Has anyone seen any explanation for this or noticed this when compared to previous year? In every instance I have no penalties, notices, anything and the drop is made up completely of "direct visits".
-
Did you guys ever make any sense out of this?
-
Did you ever come up with any explanation for this?
-
Yes I am seeing it too. Very strange. Overall my traffic on my 3 biggest sites is up, but direct visitis is down by about 30%.
-
@jp have you come up with any possible thoughts on what it could be? I am really surprised that there aren't more people talking about this. I'm at Mozcon right now. I would like to see if someone here could answer it.
-
We are experiencing a similar phenomenon.
-
I didn't ask for methods. I'm looking for an explanation of why a small sample of sites has seen huge drops in direct visits. Has anyone seen this issue?
-
This does not answer my question at all. I'm not a web novice.
I don't have your resume or a list of your websites.
So, I gave you solid data and shared a method of increasing your direct visits.
Sorry you didn't like it.
-
This does not answer my question at all. I'm not a web novice. I've been using analytics tools for years. I know for a fact there is something going on with the reporting and someone must have seen this. Here are the industries I have seen this on.
design blog
design downloads
custom t-shirts
If you look at the current month or any month this year vs the same timeframe last year you see drops anywhere from 30-60% in directs. It is not affecting my sales. It is causing goal conversions to climb arbitrarily. These sites are not all related. I have even checked against other friends with established websites and seen the same thing. If you have a site that is in a growth mode you won't notice it. I have a site that is up 250% in organic that doesn't appear the same way. Older properties with more stable traffic and less growth are showing it.
-
Has anyone seen any explanation for this or noticed this when compared to previous year?
I am only watching a few sites and we are working every day on those sites. Direct visits are climbing climbing on those sites. If you are continuously adding new content to these sites that engages the visitor your direct visits should be going up.
We are adding new content to these sites every week. And showing that content prominently on the homepage and across the site with server side includes. We also have programs that rotate the content on the homepage so visitors who visit multiple times in a week see different content on each visit. This freshness makes people come back to see what is new and that type of visit is usually a direct visit or a domain query, which I believe are enormously valuable for increasing your rankings.
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
-
Google Analytics Set-Up for site with both http & https pages
We have a client that migrated to https last September. The site uses canonicals pointing to the https version. The client IT team is reluctant to put 301 redirects from the non-secure to the secure and we are not sure why they object. We ran a screaming frog report and it is showing both URLs for the same page (http and https). The non-secure version has a canonical pointing to the secure version. For every secure page there is a non-secure version in ScreamingFrog so Google must be ignoring the canonical and still indexing the page however, when we run a site: we see that most URLs are the secure version. At that time we did not change the Google Analytics setup option to use: "https" instead of "http" BUT GA appears to be recording data correctly. Yesterday we set up a new profile and selected "https" but our question is: Does the GAnalytics http/https version make a difference if so, what difference is it?
Reporting & Analytics | | RosemaryB1 -
Google Webmaster Tools During GA Transition?
I'm working with a client that is launching a new website. Google Webmaster Tools can just be disconnected, then reconnected to the new Google Analytics property, correct? Without any data loss in Webmaster Tools? Thanks! Becky
Reporting & Analytics | | Becky_Converge0 -
Googlebot Visit Time & Date Stamps
I know that in Google Webmaster Central, we can see general Googlebot crawl stats based on dates. Our site is crawled daily. We're trying to find out the time of day Googlebot visits our site - know of any ways to do this or tools out there?
Reporting & Analytics | | Prospector-Plastics0 -
Calculating page visit duration for bounced visits?
IS there any way on Google Analytics to calculate page visit duration for bounced visits? if so, what would need to be done?
Reporting & Analytics | | offthemaptravels0 -
Expert Google Analytics: store with multiple languages and multiple sub-domians
I hope there's some hardcore Analytics shark out there, with a quick reply 🙂 I am setting up a store with multiple languages for a client and need to be able to track multiple sub-domains as a multiple languages in analytics. Example: dk.somedomain.com -> Danish language
Reporting & Analytics | | ReneReinholdt
www.somedomain.com -> English language
no.somedomain.com -> Norweigen language
.. and so on Now what the client would like is to have one single entity with multiple profiles in analytics, like this: somedomain.com
-> www.somedomain.com
-> dk.somedomain.com
-> no.somedomain.com
ex.. So if the client want's to see stats for the English language then he just vlivks the www profile and in case of danish he clicks the dk profile and so on.
problem here is I can't find an analytics help that addresses this specific issue. I have found this but that doesn't seem to cover it:. Any pointers would be greatly appreciated. 🙂0 -
No Link Data Available for this URL appears often. Are my sites too small to show up?
I am on the trial until Mar 5, 2012. I seldom get the info I want. Is it because my sites are too narrow a niche? I don't seem to be getting the data I'd like from your service. I'm trying to like it, but when I keep getting messages like this, it makes it hard to justify: "No Link Data Available for this URL appears often" Sample sites that I am unable to get data. I especially would like to know how many backlinks exist for each site. I paid someone to help me with them and I'd like to verify their work.: http://costaricadentistreview.com/ http://costaricadentistreviews.com/ http://costaricadentalimplants.org Any suggestions? Thanx Kurt Gross
Reporting & Analytics | | kurtray0 -
I am new to SEO. Would appreciate anyone share with me how can i further optimize my website to attract more visitors based on this scenario?
Hi all, Thanks and really appreciate for your time helping me out here, and i am very new to SEO. Just a brief introduction, our team have been developing a gaming review website (specifically targeting MMO game, facebook game, and browser-based game) since September 2011, and the website show significant improvement for the 1st month, and we got daily UV spiking up to 2k in November. The issue here is that the visitors start to become very stagnant, and even dropping now. Even though we try hard to publish more game reviews and there is NO IMPROVEMENT AT ALL for past 2 months in terms of number of visitors, and we have no idea how should we further proceed to attract more visitors...We have about 7 k site pages (however not all are with content). For the past 2 months it seems like there is nothing going on that proportionate to the effort we put in. Pretty discouraging, so we decided to sign up SEOMOZ to get SEO help from the community here. Some general questions we have: 1. Is it because of the the quality of the content we write ? (not enough keyword density, review too short, etc). 2. Is it because of the website designed not user friendly and not optimized? 3. Is it because of the general gaming trend, or other competitors? 4. Are we penalized by google by any chance? Are we spamming or anything wrong that deter our improvement? 5. Our main revenue source is on advertising, and currently we are using adsense. Would the ads placement affect anything? 6. Based on your knowledge and expertise, any advice would you give us? Would appreciate if you can take a kind look at the website to understand the scenario better: www.gameonline2.com, with 3 subdomain of: wiki.gameonline2; gameplay.gameonline2; cheats.gameonline2. For your reference, example our competitors are: www.onrpg.com; www.bbgsite.com; www.mmohut.com I would be happy to share with you any further information including google analytics if needed. I have report generated from SEOMOZ but i would appreciate the pros to help me take a look to give me a more complete ideas of how can i further improve to gain at least 10k visitors per day. Thanks again for your kind help and time. Andrew
Reporting & Analytics | | andrewsoh070 -
Drop In Analytics
So I have a site that was getting about 200 hits (not a lot). They came to me and asked to do SEO. There were over 50 pages in HTML format so I created header/footers and changed the .html pages to .php. I set forwards up in the htaccess and everything. I did everything that I was suppose to. Now when I go to the analytics it almost looks like it lost all it's traffic from the keywords it was ranked in. Any ideas on why?
Reporting & Analytics | | blackrino0