When my new website went live I saw a huge spike in traffic for 3 weeks but then it halved again. Why would this happen?
-
My new website went live on 13th April and the organic traffic levels increased by 110%, staying at that level for 3 weeks. Then exactly 3 weeks later the organic traffic halved again, going back to the same level as the old site.
Has anyone seen this happen before or worked out why?!
Thanks
Viki
-
Thanks George, I'll give all the things you've mentioned a try.
-
Sorry I know it was a but vague but I was just hoping to convey the big spike! The traffic shown was just organic traffic so this source does seem to be the issue, unless traffic sources are being incorrectly allocated in Analytics.
-
Hi Michael
Thanks for coming back to me, I've been going round in circles with this. I've been looking at the Google Search Console traffic queries and there are some keywords which were getting, for example, 148 impressions towards the end of April that have had none in May but when I look at keyword clicks there are no obvious keywords with less traffic. A lot of the click queries are just down by 1 or 2 clicks.
The Ecommerce conversion rate of the traffic has stayed the same and is higher than the overall site average.
Looking at the landing pages has identified a few pages that were getting 50ish clicks at the end of April but now aren't so I'll look at those more closely.
Thanks again
-
To analyze properly, I'd need organic landing page report, keyword report (from GA and Search Console), and logs for 404s.
Things to check:
- 404 adjustment - did you do something with your GA tracking as it relates to 404 pages that could have been getting organic traffic?
- Seasonal impact - what happened last year at this time, is there a weird holiday here for you? (Happy Garlic Day 4/19!)
- Brand confusion, were brand keywords possibly driving interest due to changes made, showing up as organic
I think the answer is hiding in your organic landing pages. Good Luck!
Best,
george + WholeWhale Team -
The Graph that you attached doesn't say enough. You probably want to provide more information around what traffic sources were bringing in traffic during that time. Because of tat you hopefully will get some insights where the drop is coming from and where not. It could very well be that the traffic isn't even declining from SEO in your case (based on the data that we have from the graph).
-
Try to dig deeper into where that traffic was from, check for increases from one city during this time. Do you have Google Search Console connected? Also look at where that traffic was landing and what, if any actions it was taking.
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
-
Launching a new site
What is the best method for Google Analytics implementation? Should I use the same UA id for the new site, or create an new one for the new site?
Reporting & Analytics | | brianvest0 -
We have a client that wants to apply UTM URL tagging to track local organic traffic in Google Analytics. Is there any benefit in doing this?
One of our clients requested that we apply UTM URL tagging to better track organic traffic in Google Analytics. We found this to be an odd request because we are most familiar with UTM tracking for special campaigns (referral tracking, PPC, email tracking, etc). Is there any benefit of applying UTM tags to urls to analyze local organic traffic in Google Analytics? Are there any resources out there about this? Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | RosemaryB0 -
Does "not provided" affect the referral traffic data?
There is a discrepancy between what an referring site is showing as clicks back to my site versus what Google Analytics is showing. For example - They are stating that their site sent 100 clicks to my site. The GA data shows 25 referred clicks from that site. Could this be due to the "not provided" that hides most of the keyword data?
Reporting & Analytics | | devonkrusich0 -
Sudden Increase In Number of Pages Indexed By Google Webmaster When No New Pages Added
Greetings MOZ Community: On June 14th Google Webmaster tools indicated an increase in the number of indexed pages, going from 676 to 851 pages. New pages had been added to the domain in the previous month. The number of pages blocked by robots increased at that time from 332 (June 1st) to 551 June 22nd), yet the number of indexed pages still increased to 851. The following changes occurred between June 5th and June 15th: -A new redesigned version of the site was launched on June 4th, with some links to social media and blog removed on some pages, but with no new URLs added. The design platform was and is Wordpress. -Google GTM code was added to the site. -An exception was made by our hosting company to ModSecurity on our server (for i-frames) to allow GTM to function. In the last ten days my web traffic has decline about 15%, however the quality of traffic has declined enormously and the number of new inquiries we get is off by around 65%. Click through rates have declined from about 2.55 pages to about 2 pages. Obviously this is not a good situation. My SEO provider, a reputable firm endorsed by MOZ, believes the extra 175 pages indexed by Google, pages that do not offer much content, may be causing the ranking decline. My developer is examining the issue. They think there may be some tie in with the installation of GTM. They are noticing an additional issue, the sites Contact Us form will not work if the GTM script is enabled. They find it curious that both issues occurred around the same time. Our domain is www.nyc-officespace-leader. Does anyone have any idea why these extra pages are appearing and how they can be removed? Anyone have experience with GTM causing issues with this? Thanks everyone!!!
Reporting & Analytics | | Kingalan1
Alan0 -
Our Firefox organic traffic seems to have been re-allocated to direct - anyone know why?!
In Google Analytic, the majority of organic traffic via Firefox browsers to one of our websites suddenly dropped off, and an immediate lift in direct traffic via Firefox browsers appeared. This trend has continued ever since. I've searched to find Firefox releases that might have affected it (eg. security/cookie settings), but haven't been able to find anything, or talk of this happening to other people, and the anomaly doesn't appear in our other website analytics either...anyone have any ideas?! The attached GA graphs show Firefox browser versions 21.0 and 22.0, but it's the same story across all versions. (You can also see that I'd also filtered out traffic via IOS 6 and Android 4 operating systems to remove any effect from these known issues). Thanks for any help that you can offer! kPRnrcd.png dy0Bjg7.png
Reporting & Analytics | | HubMDP1 -
Traffic Discrepancy between google and moz
I checked my traffic data this morning for this past week and there seems to be what I hope is a huge mistake. https://www.diigo.com/item/image/3vpdp/mckp My traffic seems to have dropped from 176 organic visits to 0 visits. There is no indication of this at all in Google analytics. What's going on?
Reporting & Analytics | | EcomLkwd0 -
What is click2.scour, and why is it showing up as Referral Traffic in Google Analytics?
I've noticed that a couple of my clients in the insurance industry have been receiving a pretty large boost in Referral Traffic from a source called click2.scour.com and click2.efacts.com. What surprises me most is that the traffic has a low Bounce Rate, a high Avg. Visit Duration, and is made up of 100% New Visits. What is this? Why would they be getting so much traffic from these two sources all of a sudden? Thanks in advance for your help!
Reporting & Analytics | | copyjack0 -
100% sudden drop in traffic
Hi Guys I've just had an awful fright as Google Analytics is saying my website http://www.clintonpower.com.au has dropped to nil traffic since the 14th September. I've checked Google webmaster tools and all is OK with no malware or Google blacklisting that I can see. Any ideas how I can find out what's happened? This is super scary because 99% of my business comes from Google. I really have no idea what to do next or how to investigate the problem. Is there a way I can submit a query to Google through webmaster tools? Thanks in advance! Clinton Google-traffic.png
Reporting & Analytics | | ClintonP0