Google Analytics shows wrong traffic source
-
I was reviewing out traffic sources on GA for this past week's traffic history, and noticed a couple of visits & conversions that GA cited as coming from campaigns from emails that were sent out in 2012 and early 2013. it seems odd that we would have traffic & conversions from these older campaigns - on a regular basis. it's not even from one campaign, but from multiple campaigns.
is it possible that it is a cookie issue? - i wonder if these visits were really from the email campaigns - or if they were from organic searches or other sources.
Thoughts?
Thanks!
-
Thank you so much! This makes sense now. Def. a great thing that they're loyal customers. Now I know I can just attribute it to direct, this helps me better track actual campaigns.
-
Hi Sara,
It could be a cookie issue if these visitors are originally arriving through a mail link and then revisiting directly. Direct visits do not overwrite the campaign/source cookie on the users computer so the visit is attributed to whichever source last brought them to your site which was recorded. So you could have a click from a mail link, and then 10 direct visits from the same user and this would show as 11 visits from a mail link. Campaign sources are updated when the user arrives through organic search, a referral site or a tagged campaign link (mail, ppc etc) but not when a direct visit is recorded with an existing cookie value (which btw has a 6 month lifespan). Check here for the techy bit, half way down the page at 'What Causes Updates to the __utmz Campaign Cookie?' https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/2731565?hl=en
There could be a couple of other outlying scenarios (users bookmark the page from a mail link with the utm values still in the url for example) but I think the direct visits are probably the bulk of the numbers you are seeing. The flip side is that these are usually pretty dedicated customers to your brand, hence the conversions, so things are looking good
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
-
Strange landing page in Google Analytics
Hello MOZ Community, The website in question is https://x-y.com/ When i looked at the landing pages report in GA , x-y.com is appended at the end of every URL like this. https://x-y.com/x-y.com When i open the above URL in GA interface, it shows page not found. This is obvious as there is no such URL.
Reporting & Analytics | | Johnroger
The metrics like sessions, Users, Bounce rate all look good. In the property settings, The default URL is written like this http:// cell-gate.com (Please note that s is missing in property settings). But how is traffic tracked correctly How do i solve this problem. What settings should we change to make the landing pages report look ok Thanks0 -
Was Google Analytics and Adsense Down Today?
For the last 4 hours of so we were registering zero users and Adsense reporting has not changed. We checked the site, and there were no problems. It seems for some reason there was no reporting. Just now it came back up and we are showing live traffic. Trying to figure out if this was a problem specific to us or if it is on Google's end. Thanks,
Reporting & Analytics | | akin670 -
Does referral exclusions remove the ecommerce value from Google Analytics?
Quick question on Referral exclusions. We have a client that just rebuilt their Magento website, referral data from Paypal was never an issue, the site properly attributed to source. New web devs finished the site and all purchases through Google Analytics from PayPal Is now showing as referral traffic. Doing research on the issue the suggestion was to create a referral exclusion in GA from PayPal. My question on that, will the ecommerce value default to the previous referral or will it delete the e-commerce value completely from what is gathered?
Reporting & Analytics | | BCutrer0 -
Google Analytics View Filters
Using the same GA property, I would like to set up three filtered views: 1. Tracking across one subdomain and one primary domain (example: shop.example.com & example.com) 2. Track only primary domain (example.com) 3. Track only subdomain (shop.example.com) Can this be achieved by using view filters? If so, how do they need to be set? Also, according to this article: https://moz.com/blog/cross-domain-subdomain-tracking-in-google-analytics, with cross domain tracking, I need to ignore self-referrals, which can only be done at the property level. If set up to ignore example.com referrals, will this cause problems with filter 2 and 3?
Reporting & Analytics | | Evan340 -
Google analytics : exclude traffic to a subdomain
Hi, I have a website with a client access on a subdomain. I want to exclude the traffic to that subdomain because it messes up my conversion goal for the main site. Per example, 2 out of 10 visitors are existing clients that want to access to my SaaS product. The 8 other are potential clients. I want to exclude the 2 clients from my stats so I could have the good conversion percentage for my free trial for the other 8 potential clients. Thanks in advance for your help!
Reporting & Analytics | | slestage0 -
Google Analytics Code
We have a quick question about our Google Analytics code: We recently updated to a re-marketing Analytics code, and some of our traffic numbers seem to be off by a bit. I used the Google Tag Assistant Chrome Extension today, and noticed that it's finding our old Analytics code on our pages, but it's coming up as an error due to "no HTTP Response". I am attempting to remove this code from the website, but it is nowhere to be found in the HTML coding. Only the current one is there. So I'm wondering if this second Analytics code is effecting our traffic and reporting, even if the code is currently non-functional? and if it is, how could I go about removing it if it's not currently in our HTML? Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | PlanetDISH0 -
Google Analytic - Is it possible to see which organic keyword triggered goals?
Hi, I am trying to see which of my Google organic keywords triggered my goals? In GA I click > Conversion > Goals > Overview > Source Medium (This then says where my goals came from but when I click Google / Organic it just brings me to the overview page of my organic traffic). Is it possible to see which organic keywords trigger goals?
Reporting & Analytics | | AdvanceSystems0 -
Mobile and Google Analytics
As my mobile numbers are going up in Google Analytics I'm trying to figure out what phone runs what browser. I see that 93% of mobile users have Safari which I believe is iPhone, iPad and iPods. There is a 6% usage of "Mozilla Compatible Agent". What cell phone would this be?
Reporting & Analytics | | LabadieAuto0