20% Dip in Traffic. What could be happening?
-
Hello Dear Community
Yesterday I had a sudden drop in visits - screenshot attached. It shows how yesterday Friday 17/10 has had a dip in visits vs Friday 10/10 (1 week ago).
I have an authority blog in Italy with over 90k monthly visits. I do now black-hat SEO stuff, and my content is rich. Organic traffic grew 85% y-o-y and I was actually on a nice, slow growth trend, but now, 20% dip.
The things I did before all this happened, and which could have had an impact (but I'm not sure about) are:
- Configured Max CDN and W3 Total Cache (before I was just using SiteGround's Super Cacher plugin and that's it). So now my site is faster by a lot although I'm having issues like I mention in point 2.
- I had to clear the cache at least a hundred times as I was configuring Optin Monster for lead generation
- I changed my Google Analytics code from the old version to the new version (universal)
Besides this I check my best keywords in RankTracker and it looks like nothing happened to my rankings. Yet a few of my most popular posts which gets roughly the same amount of visits everyday for the past few months, had a dip of 30% more or less.
I also added a screenshot of my Webmaster tool dashboard. Everything is ok and there are no messages. Also yesterday was not a national holiday in my country (Italy) so everything should have been normal.
Please share with me your thoughts about this. What else should I check to get an idea? What do you think it could be?
Thank you!
Andrea
-
Don't forget that for Universal Analytics the code needs to be in the head section - not in the footer (this wouldn't explain the drop in traffic however)
Did you check the pages with the Analytics plugin - to see if the tag is always fired?
There is a similar thread on Google Productforums - but the answer isn't very clear either: https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/webmasters/mrD1aOjHLC8
Without the actual url it's (and access to the stats) it's difficult to guess what could be happening.
Dirk
-
Hi Dirk, yes I'm sure the code is present on all pages. I installed in the footer.php and I'm using WordPress.
Could it be connected to Max CDN? Everytime I do some edit to the site I have to purge the cache and I'm wondering if this could lead to conflicts with GA.
Check out todays hour by hour stats versus same day last week. They are very odd:
Thank you for sharing your ideas
Andrea
-
The links to the images do not seem to work.
If you modified the Analytics code - my first idea would be to check if the tags are present on all the pages - you can do this quite easily using a customer filter in Screaming Frog. Set the Analytics on "hour" view - during the period of transition - and see if there is a sudden drop of traffic at a specific point in time - if this is the case - it's almost certain that the drop is related to a problem with the Analytics tag.
Check Analytics reports- check if the drop is equal in all sections or if the drop is significant in some sections - which could give you an indication of where to look. If you're site has a structured url - the easiest way to check this would be in the Audience report > Site Content > Content Drilldown.
Check the pages with issues with the Chrome Plugin for Analytics - check if Analytics is collecting data on these pages - you could also consider using the Analytics Debugger plugin
Dirk
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 unexplainable traffic spike
Viewing this report **Behaviour > Site content > All pages **with primary dimensions of **Page ** and **Page title **are showing different results for one specific page on our site. We noticed a huge spike in pageviews and entrances to that specific page on our site. The user flow report shows traffic going through and from the page (in high volume) from other pages on the site which suggests that it's not the usual case of spam referrals. When I view the report above by page, I get unrealistic data. Over 600% increase in pageviews and over 900% increase in entrances. When I view by page title however, I get realistic results. Can anyone help shed some light on why these two reports will be different? Anyone else seeing similar issues?
Reporting & Analytics | | OptiBacUK0 -
Why am i still seeing very recent organic kw traffic being reported in Analytics if G is now fully encrypted ?
Why am i still seeing very recent organic kw traffic being reported in Analytics if G is now fully encrypted ? Should it not all be 'Not Provided' now ? When this fully roles out if not already wont it be impossible to distinguish between brand and non brand kw ? Cheers Dan
Reporting & Analytics | | Dan-Lawrence1 -
Finding an Explanation for a Massive Spike in Organic Search Traffic
Hi, I watch analytics on a website (for a friend's business) that is reasonably stagnant, which just experienced a massive spike in search traffic for no explainable reason. The organic search engine traffic had always been steady, but about two months ago, organic search traffic started rising slowly. I checked OSE & a few other tools, but couldn't find any massive source of gained links or other explanations - just the usual occasional blog post about the company. I got in touch with my friend to see if maybe they'd gone with a competitor or something else, but he also had no idea (and even if he wasn't being honest with me, we still should've been able to spot links or social metrics or something!) Then, yesterday, their organic search traffic just tripled. The crazy thing is, it's not from one keyword: Every search term, and (not provided) essentially went up 200-400%. And I have no freaking idea why. No large gain of links. No website editing. The only possible explanation I thought up is maybe one of their competitors got knocked out, but I doubt that would cause such a stratospheric rise. So figured I'd turn to y'all. Any ideas on what might be causing such wonderful results? Anyone have any good tips on figuring out why a website could all of a sudden be doing incredibly? Analytics chart is below for the curious, and thanks in advance for any ideas / tips! nQHrscw.png
Reporting & Analytics | | FlynnZaiger0 -
Does anyone know of a way to do a profile level filter to exclude all traffic if it enters the site via certain landing pages?
Does anyone know of a way to do a profile level filter to exclude all traffic if it enters the site via certain landing pages? The problem I have is that we have several pages that are served to visitors of numerous other domains but are also served to visitors of our site. We end up with inflated Google Analytics numbers because people are viewing these pages from our partners' domains but never actually entering our site. I've made an advanced segment that serves the purpose but I'd really like to filter it at the profile level so the numbers across the board are more accurate without having to apply an advanced segment to every report. The advanced segment excludes visits that hit these pages as landing pages but includes visits where people have come from other pages on our domain. I know that you can do profile filters to exclude visits to pages or directories entirely but is there a way to filter them only if they are a landing pages? Any other creative thoughts? Thanks in advance!
Reporting & Analytics | | ATIseo0 -
Campaign shows no traffic from Analytics
My campaaigns are connected to GA but traffic is zero for all campaigns
Reporting & Analytics | | berndheyer0 -
How to see traffic for specific keywords in GA
Hell guys, What i want to achieve is to generate a list of specific keywords showing traffic for a certain periode of time. I also want so be able to compare this time period with historical data. I want a list as shown in: Traffic sources -> sources -> search -> organic. This shows a list of keywords generating traffic out of the organic search results. When you use a filter you can only use one word so it seems. I just want to create that list but with the specific keywords i choose to display. I tried advanced reports and advanced segments but that doesn't really give me what i want. The idea behind this whole thing is that i want to give my client an overview of the traffic received on the words we are optimizing for. this traffic has to be compared to the previous month so they can see clearly if there were changes. Thx !
Reporting & Analytics | | 5MMedia0 -
Should I delete a page that gets search traffic, that I don't care about?
I have a page on my site that consistently gets traffic, every month. Googlers seems to love it. But I don't like it at all. Webmaster tools shows that google allows us a certain number of search impressions each day. - it flatlines, they are limiting the impressions we get. We also getthe same number of clickthroughs each day. So my question is for anyone who has this same experience, who may have experimented by deleting a page you don't care about. Did you just lose that number of clicks each day or did other pages on your site get displayed and clicked through instead?
Reporting & Analytics | | loopyal0 -
Will having a subdomain cause referral traffic from the domain name?
Hi! One of our clients has a site with the store on a subdomain: store.example.com. When we've set up goals for order confirmation pages, we often see most of the sources attributed to example.com. Is this because of the subdomain issue? How would we correct it so that we would see as the referring source for the goal the site that sent to the root domain originally, and not the site that sent to the subdomain? Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | debi_zyx0