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".
-
Did you guys ever make any sense out of this?
-
Did you ever come up with any explanation for this?
-
Yes I am seeing it too. Very strange. Overall my traffic on my 3 biggest sites is up, but direct visitis is down by about 30%.
-
@jp have you come up with any possible thoughts on what it could be? I am really surprised that there aren't more people talking about this. I'm at Mozcon right now. I would like to see if someone here could answer it.
-
We are experiencing a similar phenomenon.
-
I didn't ask for methods. I'm looking for an explanation of why a small sample of sites has seen huge drops in direct visits. Has anyone seen this issue?
-
This does not answer my question at all. I'm not a web novice.
I don't have your resume or a list of your websites.
So, I gave you solid data and shared a method of increasing your direct visits.
Sorry you didn't like it.
-
This does not answer my question at all. I'm not a web novice. I've been using analytics tools for years. I know for a fact there is something going on with the reporting and someone must have seen this. Here are the industries I have seen this on.
design blog
design downloads
custom t-shirts
If you look at the current month or any month this year vs the same timeframe last year you see drops anywhere from 30-60% in directs. It is not affecting my sales. It is causing goal conversions to climb arbitrarily. These sites are not all related. I have even checked against other friends with established websites and seen the same thing. If you have a site that is in a growth mode you won't notice it. I have a site that is up 250% in organic that doesn't appear the same way. Older properties with more stable traffic and less growth are showing it.
-
Has anyone seen any explanation for this or noticed this when compared to previous year?
I am only watching a few sites and we are working every day on those sites. Direct visits are climbing climbing on those sites. If you are continuously adding new content to these sites that engages the visitor your direct visits should be going up.
We are adding new content to these sites every week. And showing that content prominently on the homepage and across the site with server side includes. We also have programs that rotate the content on the homepage so visitors who visit multiple times in a week see different content on each visit. This freshness makes people come back to see what is new and that type of visit is usually a direct visit or a domain query, which I believe are enormously valuable for increasing your rankings.
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
-
When I click on organic search, the biggest drop is on keyword "not provided". What does this mean?
I am trying to identify the reason for the drop in organic search.
Reporting & Analytics | | Sable_Group0 -
Creating Goals in GA
Hi I don't know if the below can be done, and I can't seem to find an answer anywhere. Ideally I want to capture the event of registering for an account. Ultimately I want to know which products, pages etc drive customer registrations but which do not lead to a purchase (Registered Not Bought). Does anyone know if this is possible? Thanks Andy
Reporting & Analytics | | Andy-Halliday0 -
Increase of direct traffic
Hi everyone, We have a weird issue in our Google Analytics account. We have enormous amount of direct traffic, but not to our homepage, but to blogs that are published and posted to facebook. e.g. yesterday we did a post and it received 3.500 visits of which 2.900 were direct.
Reporting & Analytics | | Loui-60570
I'm unable to figure out how this is possible. 90% of the direct traffic comes from mobile phones Anyone has an idea?0 -
Structured Data dropped suddenly
Just noticed a large drop in Webmaster tools of our structured data graphs. Both "items" and "items with errors" dropped. It is across the board on all our sites. Even checked some of the sites that I do consulting work for, and they dropped. My assumption is that this is another Google glitch, similar to what we saw last year, and in March of this year, where is corrected itself. Anyone else seeing anything on their end?
Reporting & Analytics | | tdawson090 -
Why My Site Got 1000% increase in organic traffic from day to night?
Did Google run any update Monday or recently? My site www.shirts4geek.com, strangely had a 1000% organic traffic increase from day to night. I didn't do anything in this site for long a time... but Monday I had a lot traffic coming from organic and every other day this week the site is doing extremely well on traffic and sales. I'm ranking first page for many keywords relate to my products. I wish I could figure out what happens so I can replicate it. The site has very links and the On Page Optimization is kind of basic. Does any have any idea how it could be possible? Have any one seen something similar lately?
Reporting & Analytics | | Felip30 -
Does a Manual Penalty Affect Other Sites in Same GA Account
Hello Mozzers, I was a bit foolish a couple of years back when first getting into the game, and employed a dodgy agency to do some SEO for me on some sites. Fast forward to this year, and the two sites in my Google Analytics account have been hit with a manual penalty. I decided to ditch the websites and move on, so removed them from my GA account, webmaster tools etc and will simply let them die a death. My question is, do you think this would affect how easy it would be to rank other websites within my GA account? Does anybody have any views on this? Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | Marc-FIMA0 -
Search Traffic Drops Before It Improves?
I'm working on a site with tons of great, useful content....the owners of the site implemented a new site layout and design (complete overhaul) and they were lacking basics such as meta descriptions, 301 redirects, and, shockingly, they had the same Title tag for every single page on a site with thousands of unique how-to articles. Unsurprisingly their traffic dropped by about 300%. They generate most of their traffic from people learning how to build stairs, how to install crown molding, and other related matters. Beginning last Thursday I've been performing basic on-site SEO, things like having unique titles for each page and similar tasks. The week from Thursday when I began until yesterday (Wednesday), Google traffic dropped -29.73% - 17,715 vs 25,210 I believe this is a normal part of the "Google Shuffle" -- does anyone have a Matt Cutts link or similar proof that this is a normal part of the process?
Reporting & Analytics | | wattssw0 -
GA mediums
I know this may be an easy question, but I keep seeing mediums titled SEM and (not set) in my GA. I can't seem to find the Google definition. Does anyone know what this means?
Reporting & Analytics | | KJ-Rodgers0