A switch from Search to Direct traffic from Feb 2012
-
I have read about the Google algorithm updates galore in 2012. I would therefore be inclined to suspect a sudden sharp drop in Search traffic this year to be caused by such updates. However, I am seeing what appears to be a direct switch from 'Search' to 'Direct' traffic as of about February 16th this year.
There are no specific brand-building exercises or general advertising campaigns happening around this time for the site in question. It seems very UN-explainable?
I wondered if there are any thoughts from the various lurking gurus? I have attached GA screenshot..
-
for sure, all the best
-
It looks as though the site lost most of its LongTail traffic... Feb 1st-15th showing 131 different keyterms and Feb 16th-28th showing just 35. At the same time the traffic from branded search terms reduced significantly across the many variations.
For the mentioned time periods, Direct Traffic was virtually double in the second period.
With the drop in search/longtail and the perfectly coinciding jump in direct traffic, as a whole the site traffic remained roughly on trend. Very strange! It has remained this way ever since.
Thanks for the advice - Keyword analysis suggests some work could be done to re-introduce what has been lost there. As for that coinciding Direct traffic jump... I need to dig into that some more to fathom it. Wish me luck.
-
Do some keyword analysis. Drill down in the analytics reports and review the keyword data to see any trends. Also take a look at where the traffic is coming from (Geo target). We had a similar situation where the direct traffic spiked for a client and it was because the development team was based in that location and they were accessing the site a lot. If that is the case you can filter that traffic using the IP's.
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
-
Slow growth in organic traffic
Hi, Recently our website after 5 months of launch started seeing more organic traffic, thanks to the seo effort being put. However, off late the growth is quite slow and we don't see much increase in organic traffic any more. Any idea on what could have happened to cause this or is it normal. Here is the link to the website to check and if you can recommend anything - https://www.keyhub.com Thanks, Search-Console-Search-Analytics-https-www-keyhub-com-1.png
Reporting & Analytics | | kh-priyam1 -
Did Analytics change the way to handle Google images searches on Dec 12?
Dear all, One of the sites I'm monitoring receives a lot of traffic from image searches or images that appear in universal search results. On Dec 12th, 2015, the bounce rate for these sessions went from around 30% the day before to around 87%. See screen shot below. Did anybody notice similar bounces in the bounce rate? Did Google change something in the way that image search is handled? Looking forward to your ideas! large?v=mpbl-1&px=999
Reporting & Analytics | | AABMarketing_Frank0 -
GA Internal Site Search Correct Query Parameter?
Hi Guys, Recently added GA internal site search to a sub-folder: http://tinyurl.com/jhm9cyl Just want to confirm would the query parameter be: /search/ Or different because it's a sub-folder? Cheers.
Reporting & Analytics | | jayoliverwright0 -
Organic and direct traffic swap
We moved to a CMS (Webhook) and when we did that organic traffic and direct traffic swapped places. Since we moved it organic traffic is down by about 400 visits and direct traffic is up by 400 visits. I went through the list below and confirmed everything is working. The http refer wasn't being passed for a couple of weeks but the issue was resolved and the organic traffic issue is still ongoing. Is there anything else that may cause this issue? I confirmed the issue isn't one of the below problems. during http to https redirect (or vice versa) the referrer may not be passed incorrect subdomain or cross-domain tracking can strip the referrer. 302 redirects sometimes caused the referrer to be dropped problems with cookies being lost/corrupted. javascript missing from certain entry pages (means any further page view looks like a direct)
Reporting & Analytics | | BT20090 -
Loss of Google referral traffic after server move / CMS move
I have a client that changed from MoveableType to Wordpress. He also changed from a dedicated server to WP Engine. He may have blocked search engines for a week or two, so his organic traffic is down but only by 25%. He's 301 redirecting all of the old pages. The mystery is that his referral traffic from Google is down 90%. It's a popular blog, so that's thousands. It's been going on a month now. Anyone seen this before?
Reporting & Analytics | | Hyper-Dog0 -
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".
Reporting & Analytics | | bradwayland0 -
How to measure number of visits from Google News coming from Google Universal Search (NOT referral coming directly coming from news.google.com) with google analyitcs
I'm running a news site, and I have a problem of accuratly measuring which traffic is REALLY coming from google news. I analyzed a lot of individual articles and I come to the conclusion, that the visits, that come from the google news section in the universal search results are counted as "normal" search engine traffic in google analytics. So if you do a Google search for a topic that includes links from Google news, you don't get an accurate referral count. As an example, if you do a search for "eBay", incorporated into the page 1 search results you may also see Google news results as well.
Reporting & Analytics | | Mulle
If someone clicks on that Google news link that appears in Google search, it shows up in Google analytics as a referral from Google search, when it was actually from a Google news referral. I was already checking google analytics and google news help forums and searched SEO blogs for this. But I wasn't able to find a working solution. Can anybody help me out with this problem? Thanks so much, Matthias0