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
-
Since implementing GDPR, has anyone seen website traffic plummet?
On December 1 and 2, I implemented a cookie banner on 5 of my Wix sites (https://www.sanitationsolutionsinc.com is one example) in order to be in compliance with GDPR, CCPA, and LGPD. Since then my traffic according to Wix Analytics and Google Analytics has plummeted. Anyone else have the same issue? How did you fix it?
Reporting & Analytics | | Jason_Taylor0 -
Over the last few months i have seen a huge spike in traffic from foreign countries
In GA i have seen a huge spike in traffic from foreign countries like japan, china, brazil, germany. the bounce rates are almost all 100%. any ideas why this is occurring?
Reporting & Analytics | | dhanson240 -
Why am i seeing google.inc in analytics as direct traffic? Bug?
Recently i have seen two clients sites see a spike in direct traffic coming from google.inc. Is this a bot/bug which i should filter out. Just a bit confused why google.inc has visited our clients site 676 times! Any insight would be great.
Reporting & Analytics | | BlueWren1 -
Self-Reffering Traffic After upgrading to Universal Analytics
Backstory: We have always had an issue with self-referring traffic but in waiting for the UA upgrade we put it on the backburner for getting fixed. We have now upgraded to UA and I was under the impression that GA would automatically exclude the domain associated with a property as a referral source. However this is not what I am seeing under my referral traffic source. With 10 websites having issues with this I need some help. Should I use the referral exclusion list? Also on a handful of our sites we have region specific URLs, I am also seeing these come in as self-referring traffic. I should also mention that about 85% of our sales are being attributed to the self-referring traffic. Here are two sites for example sake: ZootSports.com and K2snowboarding.com
Reporting & Analytics | | K2_Sports0 -
Find Pages with 0 traffic
Hi, We are trying to consolidate the amount of landing pages on our site, is there any way to find landing pages with a particular URL substring which have had 0 traffic? The minimum which appears in google analytics is 1 visit.
Reporting & Analytics | | driveawayholidays0 -
Google referral traffic drop around 14th July 2014 (UK). Anyone else seeing it?
We've seen around a 25% drop in Google referral traffic from the 14th July 2014 onwards and having real trouble identifying why and from what search terms we're being effected. WMT and Moz Pro don't show any movement. Is anyone else seeing the same thing on UK search terms? Seems a bit late to be the effect of Panda 4.0? Any help would be amazing. Thanks.
Reporting & Analytics | | whis1 -
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