Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Why would page views per visitor suddenly increase?
-
My website traffic is growing by about 1% a week. It has a fairly stable page views/visitor of about 1.69. There's normally very little variability in this As we sell an industrial product.
Today page views jumped by 50% and so did page views/visitor but visitor numbers stayed the same.
I dont have a useful hypothesis to explain this. Analytics shows me that the traffic source, country of origin and pages viewed are pretty much the same as normal. There's been no substantive change to the site (today we changed the text in a widget to link to a new page - and no one visited it). It doesn't look like 1 person has gone through the whole site as that would skew the distribution of page views by country
So why would user behavour suddenly change? I'll look at it for the rest of the week but in 7 years of looking after this website I haven't seen anything like this before.
-
If you see a sudden change in Analytics it's very often related to a problem with the tracking code. You could install the Analytics plugin for Chrome & check your pages. It could be the same visit is tracked twice - as Bill says - check the bouncerate. If this has significantly decreased it's almost certain a tracking issue.
You could check that you don't have a meta refresh or something similar which could artificially boost your page views.
Hope this helps
Dirk
-
hmm... It could be someone manually grabbing your content.... or a robot such as qualys that is visible to your analytics.
I've had both.
-
One thought is to Check your GA code, sometimes we see sites (mostly Wordpress) accidentally install the old code and new code on the same page and get wacky metrics like that. If that is the case you should see an extremely low bounce rate.
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 suddenly stopped tracking all my landing pages
Hey guys. I love the new update of GA. Looks so clean. So, of course, I was excited to see how my landing pages were doing. I went to behavior, all content, all pages. And I noticed it's only showing me 19 pages out of the 93 I have indexed. And none of the top ones at all! Can't find them anywhere in GA! Anyone seen this before? Thank you so much
Reporting & Analytics | | Meier0 -
Should I use sessions or unique visitors to work out my ecommerce conversion rate?
Hi all First question here but I've been lingering in the shadows for a while. As part of my companies digital marketing plan for the next financial year we are looking at benchmarking against certain KPIs. At the moment I simply report our conversion rate as Google Analytics displays it. I was incorrectly under the impression that it was reported as unique visits / total orders but I've now realised it's sessions / total orders. At my company we have quite a few repeat purchasers. So, is it best that we stick to the sessions / total orders conversion rate? My understanding is multiple sessions from the same visitor would all count towards this conversion rate and because we have repeat purchasers these wouldn't be captured under the unique visits / total orders method? It's almost as if every session we would have to consider that we have an opportunity to convert. The flip side of this is that on some of our higher margin products customers may visit multiple times before making a purchase. I should probably add that I'll be benchmarking data based on averages from the 1st April - 31st of March which is a financial year in the UK. The other KPI we will be benchmarking against is visitors. Should we change this to sessions if we will be benchmarking conversion rate using the sessions formula? This could help with continuity and could also help to reveal whether our planned content marketing efforts are engaging users. I hope this makes sense and thanks for reading and offering advice in advance. Joe
Reporting & Analytics | | joe-ainswoth1 -
How to get multiple pages to appear under main url in search - photo attached
How do you get a site to have an organized site map under the main url when it is searched as in the example photo? SIte-map.png
Reporting & Analytics | | marketingmediamanagement0 -
How can I use Google Analytics to detect users viewing my website on a TV?
I want to see in Google Analytics whether or not people are viewing my website on a TV, such as with a smart TV or other device connected to their TV. These are the only ways to do this that I have found so far: Operating system: Google TV, Nintendo Wii, Playstation 3, Xbox Browser: Nintendo Browser, Playstation 3 Are there other data points that I can reliably use to segment these users?
Reporting & Analytics | | RCF0 -
Organic Traffic From...Mountain View, CA?
I've noticed something a little odd in my organic search traffic lately. Looking at several websites that target the Minneapolis area, I'm seeing some organic searches come in (typically using head keywords - no geo-modifier) from Mountain View, CA. There's no way we are truly ranking well on these terms in California, so it certainly feels like Google sniffing around. I was worried that perhaps they were checking into penalizing us or something, but we've actually seen upticks in search traffic lately. This traffic is not showing up in Google Analytics, just Adobe SiteCatalyst. In the past, spikes from random locations were probably some sort of crawler, like the preview bot, but these are coming in as searches with (for now) keyword data. Has anyone else seen anything like this?
Reporting & Analytics | | SarahLK0 -
Why are plus signs (+) suddenly showing up in Google Analytics organic search keywords reports?
Since June 13, 2013, the number of organic search queries containing a plus sign (+) has gone up over 1,000% compared to the previous period on my site in Google Analytics. These plus signs appear to be taking the place of spaces in these search queries (i.e. "word1+word2+word3"). This appears to be almost (or completely) Google organic traffic, not other search engines. Since I highly doubt searcher behavior would change so suddenly, I'm trying to figure out why Google is replacing spaces with plus signs. Is anyone else seeing this? Any ideas?
Reporting & Analytics | | RCF0 -
Does analytics track an order two times by refresh on the confirmation-page?
Hi there,
Reporting & Analytics | | Webdannmark
I have a quick question. Does Google analytics track an order two times, if the user buys a product, see the confirmation page and then click refresh/click or back and forward again?
The order/tracking data must be the same, but i guess the tracking code runs for every refresh and therefore tracks the order two times in Analytics or does analytics know that it is the same order? Someone that can clearify this?Thanks! Regards
Kasper0 -
Open internal links in a new tab increase bonus rate?
Hello! This week I used a simple method to reduce my blog Google Analytics bounce rate. My blog all the posts are guides, in order to follow them, user need to download a zip file (same zip file). Otherwise they can't. Therefore I added a separate blog post to download all the necessary files. As a result of that I can reduce my bounce rate from 62-70% to 45-50% level. Now I'm thinking to open that zip file download page in a new tab. If I open my blog zip file download page, in a new tab. It will again increase my bounce rate? I reduced my bounce rate using that zip file download page. Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | Godad0