Magic UVs - PPC landing pages delivering organic traffic by magic...
-
I have checked and double checked this.
GA is showing over the last couple of weeks mysite.com/ppc/landingpage1 as a landing page for organic traffic, where it shouldn't.
Main facts:
- The entire /ppc/ folder is blocked from the googlebot, and doesn't appear on any internal site maps. As far as I can tell, these pages have never been cached for the main index.
- I cannot recreate any of the organic searches myself (i.e. typing in keywords that triggered the traffic, even the almost unique long-tail ones). We just don't appear in the organic listings with these pages.
- The analytics and adwords accounts are linked. We are not paying for this mystery traffic through our PPC - these keywords are not appearing in our AdWords account (though other keywords / traffic are).
- The traffic is real - we have received phone calls from these pages, tracked to the visits recorded as organic
These pages should only receive PPC traffic. They are receiving organic traffic also, but I can't recreate it. Can anyone suggest what's going on? I'm concerned about duplicate content issues and also skewing the analysis of the PPC campaign.
Thanks
-
I must admit, this one has me stumped. It sounds like there's some sort of tracking issue going on, but who knows.
Did you ever get this figured out?
-
I realize you're probably not going to like this response, but, I would recommend not having separate landing pages for PPC. Here's a few reasons why:
1. You don't need it. You can analyze how organic traffic with the exact same keywords performs against PPC traffic on the same page.
2. You're now testing/optimizing 2 sites instead of 1.
3. It causes wary users to trust you less when they realize they're landing on different pages of your site when in each case, they've come from Google.
4. There's evidence that having your organic result and your PPC result go to the same page actually increases conversions, although it is hotly debated.
5. You're going to deal with a lot of duplicate content issues.
Edit: to answer your actual question, are you blocking organic traffic from those PPC pages via robots.txt? Robots.txt only blocks crawling of the content on the page, not the URL itself, so if your PPC page has a keyword rich URL, organic users are still going to find it.
-
A couple of thoughts:
Is this organic traffic definitely from Google, not from another search engine that you may may not have blocked?
Alternatively, could there be a problem with the tracking parameters getting stripped out of the URLs?
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
-
Sudden drop in traffic since website redesign – can't spot double firing sessions pre-update
Hi all, We launched an updated website around mid-April and have seen a long-term drop in unique page views and sessions since then. Between 25-35%. Page views returned to normal within a month, however. In terms of acquisition, we've not lost referrals or direct traffic, just organic sessions. I haven't seen any significant Google updates except for 'Fred' but that was in March (pre-website update). We did have to do some 301s and fix up an HTML and XML sitemap, etc, post launch – but that's been in place for a while now so shouldn't still have such an effect? We are also struggling with load speed at the moment, working on this at the moment. Didn't think this had a such a significant impact on ranking however. We've lost mostly non-UK traffic, especially USA. We're actually climbing rankings for a lot of new keywords I'm targeting, so I can't see how our SEO has been hampered. Frustratingly, I wasn't using Search Console or Moz Pro before this update, so can't compare much in the way of keyword traffic (I know I feel very silly now). I don't know if it's a reporting issue (I wish it was). I mean we had both GTM and GA tags on the website (I didn't know this until I looked into it) but these were present post website-launch. And I haven't found enough double firing sessions or page views to suggest we used to be getting double figures anyway. Before this, we were ranking brilliantly and getting more organic traffic than ever. All the best,
Reporting & Analytics | | landport0 -
Whats (Other) traffic in Google Analytics?
When I look through all our clients, a few are receiving the majority of their traffic from (other). [ Acquisition > Channels > (Other) ]. The only option in (other) is "website" or "offline", whatever that may be. And even weirder, the avg session duration is 0:00. Any idea what this may be?
Reporting & Analytics | | W2GITeam0 -
Page Performance
Not long ago, I had a couple of peers asking why I was using sessions to evaluate page performance. They said it wasn't a good metric for evaluating a single page because it only looked at how many site visitors began their journey through you site form that page. They were trying to convert me over to pageviews, which they said was a superior metric because it show you every time that page had been loaded and therefore provided better insight. Moz uses sessions on their landing page report. Is this because it's an SEO tool, so all they are concerned with is how individual URLs attract site traffic? Signed, Confused in California
Reporting & Analytics | | PGD20110 -
Direct Traffic has Drastically Increased
Hi, I have noticed in Google analytics that direct traffic of one of my website is increased drastically. I didn't participate in Email Marketing or any other paid campaigns however direct traffic is continuously increasing. I checked all sources, locations, browsers, filters etc but didn't get any findings. Please help.
Reporting & Analytics | | RuchiPardal0 -
Is google too volatile to rely on? Should I move to PPC? (screenshots attached)
I've attached 2 analytics screenshots of sites of mine. I can't believe how volatile google has been this year for no apparant reason. The on site of my sites has not changed much throughout the year and I've not spent any serious amount of time on link building after initially building some links when the sites where first launched. As you can see from Screenshot 1 show gradual growth throughout the year but in August google completely killed all traffic from my site. Disheartened I pretty much gave up and didn't spend any time on the site at all. The for no reason in September the site bounced back with more traffic than ever. The second screenshot for another of my sites shows intial growth and the google kills the visits again in April. It's not until June that the site starts to see growth again but after it reaches its peak mid October google kills all traffic again! Does anyone else think that google is far to volatile for any serious business to rely on it for generating customers? I'm considering moving to PPC which is probably the end game for google but early tests show conversion rates are much lower on adwords which I don't really understand as it's essentially the same traffic source. I've been careful to create relevant landing pages for keywords in adwords. Any thoughts greatly appreciated. 3Itysj1.png ijoarzV.png
Reporting & Analytics | | SamCUK0 -
Why is Google Analytics showing index.php after every page URL?
Hi, My client's site has GA tracking code gathering correct data on the site, but the pages are listed in GA as having /index.php at the end of every URL, although this does not appear when you visit the site pages. Even if there is a redirect happening for site visitors, shouldn't GA be showing the pages as their redirect destination, i.e. the URL that visitors actually see? Could this discrepancy be adversely affecting my search performance? Example page: http://freshstarttax.com/innocent-spouse/ shows up in GA as http://freshstarttax.com/innocent-spouse/index.php thanks
Reporting & Analytics | | JMagary0 -
Google Analytics - Referral Traffic Question
How Google Analytics determine that some particular web site referred traffic if there is no back link on that site?
Reporting & Analytics | | DiamondJewelryEmpire1 -
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