Why is my direct traffic down DRASTICALLY?
-
I have been seeing a trend for a while that is intesifying.
My direct traffic numbers are down A LOT. We are not down 50% to LY (in actual number not just percentage of traffic)
I am trying to understand what could be the causes of this issue.
I was considering simply bigger meaner competition, but I actually perform decently on my returning customers. Also my performance on my brand keyword is more inline with my current trend so I would except these KW to do equally as bad if the actual brand/store was the issue.
The more surprising even, is the fact that I can trace back the start of the trend exactly to the day. Overnight on Sept 22 LY direct traffic went down 30% (to LY) when it was trending UP 20-25%(to LY) before.
Now, we did do a redesign of the website on May 2011 (4 months before the drop), and did change host Oct 2011 (a couple weeks after the start of the trend).
Do you have any clue as to why this could be happening?
Did GA start tracking direct traffic differently?
Any thoughts? -
Hi, I read you story with the direct traffic and I am experiencing the same problem. Have you found a solution?
Thanks a lot !
-
Thanks! I am not sure how to look at ISPs of the visit. As far as email newslrtter, it was always done with mailchimp and tracked as such I believe (in campaigns).
-
Well yes and no. It depens on the time frame. We have seen a drop of traffic all over recently (after the new panda/penguin updates) but at the time the switch occured (Sept 21 2011) and for several months after that, other traffic types were up which was consistent with what we were experiencing before the direct traffic drop. No switch in sources.
Direct traffic starts dropping overnight sept 21st
Referrals start dropping about Oct 18th
Organic search is up and doing fine the entire time, but not showing a spikeNow numbers are different, but the environment is different, which is why I choose to look back at last Fall to try to identify what happened.
Hubby is looking into services we might have stopped using that might have been the cause.. -
While you have seen a drop in direct traffic, have you seen an increase in any other type of traffic?
-
In GA, look at the ISPs of the visits to see if one dropped off. We had a monitoring service that was actually triggering javascript that tweaked our direct numbers at a company once. Another thing that would affect it is doing email marketing and doing a tracking code so that suddenly the people who were direct (clicking on the link from the email) are now showing up as email referrals.
-
What are these "direct" visitors doing on your site?
Hitting a specific page? Loading an image? Robots crawling? Robots checking pages for change?
I am suspicious that these are not genuine human visits.
-
Hi, yes I mean actual direct traffic , not search related. No outside mktg was done so it cannot be that. Newsletter increased since then, so not that either.
Search on brand term is doing ok, but direct traffic is WAY down.
I thought it could be the way google assigns direct now vs then.. But cant find any info to substantiate that. I would accept a double digit drop but the fact it happens overnight, just seems weird..I am attaching the graph to show what I mean...
-
Hmm.. Well It is not that It is just surfacing, it is just that I am asking around only now
I have a sitemap and no problem for page indexation. The pages that are losing the most traffic are still indexed. no issue with that.
We also have no errors 400 or 500 recorded on GWT..Given we apparently had a previous SEO dude use link exchange network on us (yeah I know nothing better than getting f**ked and paying for it) we do fall in the penguin a bit and did fall a bit in the panda updates, but more in a slow manner, losing positions one at a time, rather than being dumped to page 5 or 40 overnight. Though I dont see what that would have to do with direct traffic loss??
-
Your direct traffic meaning people typing your domain in to their address bar, correct? Nothing to do with search, right? Or do you mean traffic from Brand terms? If it is direct traffic, did you stop any sort of non-search marketing around the same time that you didn't believe was producing any results e.g. email marketing, yellow page (or any other print) etc... if so, perhaps it was actually working and had people going directly to your website. If you mean traffic from brand terms could you share your URL with us?
-
)
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
-
Decline in Traffic
Our company is a full service law firm with a main website and 6 microsites relevant to each practise area. Over the last 2 years, we have had significant traffic growth and ranked well in SERP, conversions were good and everything was tracking along nicely. Come January 2019, the traffic on 2 of our microsites have dropped by 20% and is not recovering. We have done a site audit and there are no issues with the website, we are still ranking #1 in SERP for our targeted search terms but the traffic just isn't there. Has anyone else with legal websites had this issue or can provide insight into the drop in traffic? It just doesn't make sense why all of a sudden the traffic isn't there anymore. Any advice on what other actions we can take to try and find the issue would be appreciated.
Reporting & Analytics | | monique-plaw0 -
Has anyone else seen a large increase in Direct Traffic in Analytics since August 21 2017?
I work at an agency that has Google Analytics to many different sites. About half of them have seen a huge increase in their "Direct" traffic since August 21. Given the cross section of sites I am viewing, I don't think this issue just effects our clients. So has anyone else seen this issue? Any ideas on how to correct/filter?
Reporting & Analytics | | Rogersthe3rd1 -
Organic Traffic Spike
I've been chipping away at the SEO for a client's site for about 6 weeks and a few days ago noticed a huge spike in organic traffic for about a dozen keywords. See attached. Previously traffic was around 20-30 unique new visitors a day. On the 17 it went up to 500+ for 1 day, now it's come back down again. This spike was not for 1 keyword but for about a dozen. I've never seen this before and wondered if anyone had experienced similar. The site is about 3 months old. ebix3rl
Reporting & Analytics | | deployseo0 -
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 -
Domain redirect for direct mail (source) tracking in Analytics?
We have a client that would like to do some direct mail marketing and the plan is to use a short/simple domain in the marketing materials, which redirects to the main site domain. By default this would show as a referral traffic source in Analytics, right? So any traffic that came through that redirect would be attributed to "shortdomain.com / referral"? Meaning I wouldn't need to do any sort of customized, advanced tracking set up to track conversions that I've already set up (ecomm and goals) and attribute them to this new source? Just double checking that I'm not overlooking something. Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | VTDesignWorks0 -
What is the difference between "Organic Traffic" and the "Non-Paid Search Traffic" default segment in Google Analytics?
These two filtering options ("organic traffic" in the left sidebar and "non-paid search traffic" in the advanced segments) give me slightly different numbers. Any idea why this would be the case?
Reporting & Analytics | | FPD_NYC1 -
Getting traffic for another site
Hi Everyone, Our website url/brand is very close to another website url/brand. We are non-competing entities. It appears as though this other company has begun a marketing program which has resulted in our traffic skyrocketing. However, it seems to have also resulted in our Pages/Visit and Visit Duration to decrease and our Bounce Rate to increase. Can anyone suggest how to deal with this type of scenario? Thanks,
Reporting & Analytics | | AC_Pro
Robert0 -
I made 18 websites and the traffic keeps going down over 3 months
I made 18 websites, and have used a analytics web app called piwik. You can google it, but basically it is like google analytics. I have done nothing for the websites no links, no updates. I did do the onpage optimization extremely well. At first I had daily traffic over all the websites at about 200, then like a month went by and it was at 100, then another month has gone by it is hovering around 30 visits -- This is total traffic across all the websites. In addition my websites were ranking much better and alot of them were coming up together in the results in a single google query, now this is no longer true, only one or maybe two come for the same google query and they come up lower in the serp ranking ie. before it was 1st place now 3rd for example, so traffic has decreased respectively. Anybody can tell me what I can do, to regain the positions and traffic I had before.
Reporting & Analytics | | mickey110