Spike in Direct visits with Drop in Google Organic Visits
-
Does anyone have an explanation for why Google organic visits plummeted while direct visits rose the same amount. Total visits have been very normal.
-
Hi Patrick,
I'm really glad I found your question/post. I'm looking at a similar scenario in which there has been a major uptick on 3/11/14 for Direct Traffic (and similarly, a slight drop in Organic). We also have a phone tracking system that works with Cookies to display a certain telephone number based on the web referral that is reporting a similar anomaly. Many of our customers are a little "old school" and still use Internet Explorer to browse our website (about 50% of the users) and I noticed that, more than any other browser, IE showed the greatest transparency between the spike in Direct and the drop in Organic - all coinciding with a specific date: 3/11/2014 (see below).
It's also interesting to note that Google Webmaster Tools launched their Index Status Tool update on 3/9/14. I've always been under the impression that Google Analytics tracked both http and https traffic together, but since the update to the GWT tool, is it possible that the traffic was tracked as Direct rather than Organic (it's sad to say, but yes, we just recently noticed that Google had indexed both http and https versions of our website by (our) mistake, so, who knows...).
I also noticed that Microsoft had issued Vulnerability reports for that specific date as well - and one of the main technologies they listed as "effected" was Internet Explorer. So.... lots of detective work, but I do like the checklist that Paul Thompson had put together for you. Very helpful indeed!
Please let us know if you have any updates to your organic/direct traffic numbers!
-
Over the past week, we have decided to convert the site to Wordpress so I am hoping the problem will resolve after that.
-
Most welcome., Patrick. Does it look like one of those issues might be a candidate for the source of your problem?
P.
-
Thank you very much for the insight.
-
This is clearly a case of organic traffic being misclassified as direct, since total traffic is unchanged and the drop in organic happens exactly at the same time as the uptick in direct.
Since direct traffic is specifically visits for which no referrer has been captured, it means something's changed to cause the referrer to be stripped out or not set on the majority of your organic visits.
There's a looong list of the kinds of things that can cause this, such as:
- during http to https redirect (or vice versa) the referrer may not be passed (this is the first thing I'd check)
- 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. (this will often show as a major shift in pages/visit)
- javascript missing from certain entry pages (means any further page view looks like a direct)
- changes to PPC tracking. If you were getting lots of paid search traffic that wasn't tagged, it will look like organic. If incorrect/broken tagging is then added, it will look like direct traffic
Bottom line is, something has changed that is affecting the collection of referrer data. It's gonna take some serious detective work to figure out what, because these can often be changes that wouldn't - at first glance - appear to have anything to do with Analytics. (This is why I try to push clients so hard to track EVERYTHING they change on a website with a note in the Annotations section of the Analytics account.)
The fact you have a clear date for the occurrence may make things a little easier. Go back through your email from around that date and see if anything there alerts you to any work that was being on the site at the time e.g. SSL or domain renewals, marketing campaigns that used redirects starting or ending, etc. You can also look at the Change History section of the account (under Admin) to see if anything catches your eye.
Good luck! Hope that helps with some places to start looking?
Paul
-
My first guess would be some sort of reporting error as I'm not sure what would cause such a quick and drastic shift like that. Second, I would check if the entrance/landing pages in analytics are the same or not. Check the related pages to see if anything may have been changed on them to create this. Two of the sites I work on have had some changes over the past few months with respects to organic vs. direct traffic where our organic has slipped a bit more and more but it is turning into direct traffic, but definitely not on the scale of what has happened to you.
-
If that is what has happened. I'll be honest, I haven't seen something quite like this before, so would just be a fact-finding mission to track the problem down.
-Andy
-
I think the better question should have been "Why were Google organic visits suddenly counted as direct visits instead?"
-
That rules out Page layout.
It does look like a penalty of some sort though. it might be worth checking just to make sure someone hasn't disallowed the whole site from Google in some manner.
Then there is the question of why has traffic increased at the same time as the drop? Do they run a mailing list at all? Have you had a look through the list of referrers to see where this traffic is coming from? Is it all from direct visits, i.e people are typing in the URL?
-Andy
-
Thanks for the response Andy. I don't think anything had been changed, the site has been very static for the last few years. The date is January 25th. But total visits have not fluctuated other than seasonably. No Ads on the site.
-
Hi Patrick,
Are there any ads on the site? What was the exact date of the organic drop? I'm just wondering if perhaps it could have been the Page Layout algorithm update?
Was any work carried out prior to this?
-Andy
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
-
Can Segment capture organic traffic? If so is it more reliable than Google Analytics?
Hi mozzers, We just learned that our standard GA hasn't been as reliable as we hoped so and we are trying to find other ways to track organic sessions. Which solution would you consider? Is Segment one of them? If so, is it more reliable than Google Analytics? Thanks
Reporting & Analytics | | Ty19861 -
Can the end of a competition cause a drop in organic visitors?
Hi everyone, Over the last six months I've been running a few competitions on my largest site, but noticed a very large decrease in organic sessions just after the third one ended. For reference, the site is ~10 years old and gets a couple of million sessions per month.Organic sessions throughout last year and before the holiday periods were around 800k/month, which then increased by 50% during the holiday period alongside a competition I ran.These competitions double the pages per session and add another 1.5 minutes onto session duration. At the end of one of the competitions this year, daily organic sessions halved overnight and are now below the baseline of last year - and not improving. Some possible causes include; Google update - unlikely, because the date of the drop doesn't coincide with any increase in SERP volatility that I can find The extremely quick overnight drop in engagement (pages/session and session duration falling back to pre-comp baseline) caused Google to believe our site to be less popular and thus less deserving of rankings Visitors who've been bombarded with month-long competitions are sick of seeing them and are not searching for my site so often Email tagging - in the week before, UTM tracking parameters were added to all emails (of which there are a lot of subscribers) - as the number of Email visitors in Analytics increased, Organic did slightly decrease at the same time. I think this is unlikely, but I wonder if somehow some of our email visitors were previously being classed as Organic as well as some being Direct Incorrectly tagged as Direct - at the same time as the organic drop, Direct traffic doubled - it has since decreased back to just above the Direct baseline, however Organic has not improved I'd just be interested to know if anyone has any experience with something similar happening and, if so, what do you think the cause was and how did you rectify it? Thank you very much for your input in advance!
Reporting & Analytics | | serges780 -
Google Analytics Real Time Not Working! :(
Hello Everyone, Today, the real time feature in my google analytics stopped working. I am able to see that traffic is visiting my site, but not in real time. The real time count is usually at 0. But, there are some instances where real time will come back online, but there will be only 1 unique visitor. At any given time, our website usually has 20 visitors or so..Has anyone encountered this issue? Where should i start looking for fixes? What are the possible problems? Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | KarlMarxTheBear0 -
Weird Google Analytics tracking question
I have a client that has a market place site, where people list goods and sell them, think something like Etsy. Instead of developing a system to show the users page views and things like that, does it sound reasonable to let them enter a Google Analytics property on the pages they list on, then let them monitor through GA? Does anyone see any fatal flaws in this thinking?
Reporting & Analytics | | LesleyPaone0 -
How would I create this type of report in Google Analytics?
I work for an e-commerce site. I would like to run a weekly report to see what every category pages increase and decrease for pageviews would be. How would I do that?
Reporting & Analytics | | EcommerceSite0 -
Where to find "Keywords that Sent Organic Search Visits" in Google Analytics?
Hi everyone, Tried searching for this answer but couldn't find it. In the new analytics, I can see that there is a graph that shows the number of unique keywords that brought traffic to our site sorted by weeks. I can't seem to find this data in Google Analytics. I can only find the number of visits but not sorted by how many keywords, instead it is just # of visits from all of the keywords. Thanks in advance. SZ
Reporting & Analytics | | swzhai0 -
How to see organic traffic only?
Im having trouble separating our organic traffic vs our PPC. When I go into Analytics>Traffic>Sources>Search>Organic, its giving me numbers that are not accurate. I believe whats happening is that its not able to distinguish our bing organic/ppc. Is using Webmaster tools Search Queries a more accurate way to determine organic search volume?
Reporting & Analytics | | DemiGR0 -
Google Analytics
Hi I added one google analytics account with a third party business as an admin, and I accidentally shared all the accounts of my clients. So this business have access to all my google analytics account. How do I remove them as an admin of all the GA accounts except the one they need? A step by step process is welcomed 🙂 Thank you,
Reporting & Analytics | | Ideas-Money-Art0