Very specific visitor drop
-
Hello there,
Last week I discovered an unnatural drop in the direct traffic channel while analyzing all traffic channels. I dived into the data and discovered the following aspects of the traffic drop:
The drop is only caused by:
- Direct traffic coming from browser Safari on Apple tablets (Safari traffic includes 83% of all direct tablet traffic)
- Android, mobile and desktop traffic didn't drop at all
- The direct tablet traffic dropped on the 1st of October
- It has never dropped before and it has grown naturally every month since more than a year
- In week 42 we only made 35% of the revenue we made in week 39. We're talking about k's.
I attatched two screenshots coming from Google Analytics: the drop of direct tablet traffic compared to direct mobile traffic, and the drop of direct Safari tablet traffic compared to direct Android tablet traffic.
We asked our web developer (SEOShop) about possible changes they made around the 1st of October to i.e. our mobile website. They said that they didn't change anything but they pointed to Hummingbird that has been released around that date. I can't link the traffic issue with Hummingbird though..
Can anybody let their light shine about this one? I'm very thankful.
Marcel
-
Hi Mike,
Thanks for this piece of information. This is exactly what happened. I checked the other side of the data: organic Safari tablet traffic and it has grown since the first of October.
Thanks again.
Marcel
-
This may help explain some things http://searchengineland.com/rejoice-safari-is-once-again-providing-google-referral-information-in-ios-168493
-
It seems I recently read that Safari had some sort of code change that was causing GA to not track visits from those systems. But I have no idea where I read it. Probably worth a google search for something like "safari bug with google analytics"....
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
-
Increase in Direct traffic, drop in Google traffic, after updating Google Analytics settings.
I made some changes to our Google Analytics property settings (see notes in screenshot). As a result, there was an equal drop in Google traffic and increase in Direct traffic. Has anyone else seen something like this before? I'm wondering if I should revert. jE7buO6
Reporting & Analytics | | vcj0 -
Drop in direct traffic
Hi, I help look after two websites and have been tracking traffic sources for a couple of years. I have noticed that both sites have seen a drop in direct traffic over 2 years. Has anyone else noticed this and do you have a hypothesis as to the reason? Overall, on both sites traffic has increased. Thanks, Amelia
Reporting & Analytics | | CommT0 -
Deleted Rarely Visited Pages - Traffic Dropped (Big Time)
Hi folks: I'd appreciate any thoughts you might have on a problem I am having with organic traffic. One of our sites has about 500 pages/blog posts. We had about 200 pages that no one was visiting, or only one to ten people had visited in an entire year. As a result, we decided to experiment, and delete any page which had fewer than 5 visits in a year. This resulted in a deletion of about 90 pages.We did this on April 6 or 7 of this year. Two days later, we had a substantial drop in visits to the site. We had been getting about 300 sessions a day. Now, we are lucky to get that in a month. I know there was an algorithm update in late March, but our traffic dropped about two weeks after that, and a day or so after the deletion of the pages. There is a clear demarcation on analytics. I gave it a month, the traffic did not recover, so we decided to restore the pages. Traffic has not recovered and it has been about 3 months now. Does anyone have any thoughts on why we might have experienced such a drastic drop as well as what we might do to recover from it? Thanks very much
Reporting & Analytics | | jnfere0 -
Traffic Drop with no real explaination?
Hello Everyone, On one of my sites PokerOnaMac we experienced a 75% drop in traffic in about a week (since September 3rd). I took a look at GA and the penalties have been applied sitewide. I also checked my Google Webmaster Tools, and there are no messages regarding "unhealthy link structures." We have had other sites penalized by Penguin & Manual Removals, but they are recovering now. What is my best bet to find what is wrong? Thanks
Reporting & Analytics | | BestOdds0 -
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 -
Bounce rate consistently dropping
We started using SEO MOZ campaigns and crawl diagnostics for our site in November 2011. At that time, our bounce rate was 57.58%. From there, it has consistently dropped. Dec. 57% Jan. 24.86% Feb. 14.61% March 17.48 % April 12.35% We started out with 1,000's of errors showing up in the crawl diagnostics, down to under 50. could this be associated with the bounce rate drop?
Reporting & Analytics | | Stevej240 -
Google Webmaster Dropped Traffic
Hi Guys, I've recently implemented a new site design with a new url architecture etc.. I set up Google Webmaster tools in early March and went live with the new site on 2nd April. Since the 6th April (4 days after going live) I've notice a drop in impressions from 15,000 - 28,000 per day to 3,500 - 5,500 per day. Now I'm kind of new to this, so after I cleaned up after my initial panic, I checked impressions vs. clicks. Impression are down 44% and clicks 31%. Not bad I thought but then again what if I dropped so far off the radar I never made an impression. 1. So first question: Are the number of impressions of a keyword independant of ranking. So if I rank #3,445,234th will I still see impressions listed but avg. position reflect #3,445,234? So while I was thinking of asking these questions I checked Google Analytics for which I have just over 3 years of metrics. Compared to the past; overall traffic and organic traffic are the same if not 10-20% better. 2. So second: Am I missing something? Its a resort website so easter just ended and you would expect the traffic to match and drop, but such a sudden and dramitic drop in Webmaster Tools impressions does not match Google Analytics. Infact Organic traffic climbed slightly. Can anyone offer any insight? Thanks, Adam
Reporting & Analytics | | NaescentAdam0 -
Weird drop in ranks... google.fr
Hello folks, Before our domain: <cite>www.convertisseurvideo.net</cite> Keyword: convertisseur video ( convert your video ) is at the first(page) google.fr for this keyword search. Right now, its at second page, really dropped. And our CTR = 1% . How can we improve the CTR? Any toughts ? Thanks. ss.JPG
Reporting & Analytics | | augustos0