Why do all traffic curves show a "saw tooth" pattern in Google Analytics
-
Greetings Mozzers
This sounds like a dumb question, but it's bothering me just the same and I would like to think what the fine community of SEO experts at MOZ thinks
I have taken a look at the traffic curve for about 20 different sites in very different industries (home improvement, wedding party supplies, pet feeding systems) and it seems to me that they all show a saw tooth pattern, more or less like the one below.
-
Also, the weekend patterns get further amplified if you turn ppc off for the weekend.
-
I see something similar; in my case it's because we get less traffic on weekends, so there is a weekly sawtooth. Do your dips correspond to weekends?
-
Hi Tom
Thanks for your answer. And yes, this jagged edge (saw tooth) pattern changes with the timescale. Sorry about the attachment, here it is again http://imgur.com/c9w4IkF
What i would really like to know is: does someone does NOT see this pattern in their daily traffic?. I would find it remarkable if everyone showed the saw tooth pattern, independent of industry.
Cheers
-
Hey there
Looks like you've left off the attachment there, but I can imagine what you mean.
Quick question - what time-scale are you using to view things in Google Analytics?
Have you tried changing the view to weekly or monthly? You can do this by clicking the buttons on the right-hand side of the dashboard, here's a screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/SEm37Kt.png
I've found that this often gets rid of that jagged effect you're talking about and allows for smoother data lines, which can help you identify trend lines a bit more easily.
Hope this helps.
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
-
COVID-19 Impacts on Traffic?
How many people here have witnessed some decline in traffic due to pandemic..? It's a thought that since people all around the world are in home and the usage of internet has increased a great deal the traffic on sites should also increase but that is not the case with me on different websites in past 3 weeks... How many people have witnessed the traffic difference ever since the pandemic started or from start of the month of March..? Share your thoughts.
Search Behavior | | asifseo0981 -
Export Google Search Results
I would like to export a list of pages indexed by Google and other search engines. According to our site search with google, we have over 300,000 pages indexed. Anyway to export a list of all of these pages? Tools like ScreamingFrog (which I own a copy of) can crawl your site but does not tell you the pages indexed by a search engine... I've tried using tools that will let you export each page of the results. However, this won't work for a 300K page website. Thanks for your help!
Search Behavior | | Evan_Wright0 -
I changed my home title and meta description but on google, i still see the old title and meta description. Whats the problem here?
I basically changed the title and meta description of my homepage and when i search on google, it still shows old. Whats the issue?
Search Behavior | | prestigeluxuryrentals.com0 -
My site traffic decreasing day by day
unfortunately its very bad for us . after panda update not affected any more but recent time . anybody can help us to fix the issue blog http://gurujobalert.com/ please thanks in advance
Search Behavior | | jenindras10 -
Personalised Geo-targeted results - How does Google pass link juice?
Hello, Many websites now serve specific home page offers based on the location of the customer, my question is, how does link juice flow around a site when the links (this case from the homepage) are served up based on a visitors location? Internal links from your homepage are valuable for ranking that product well in the SERPs so how does Google deal with this? So, for example, a car hire website based in the UK. If you arrive on the care hire website sat in Manchester (Northern UK city), on the homepage the website serves offers of car hire deals in Manchester, Leeds, London and international destinations. If you arrived on this website from London (Southern UK City), you would not see the Manchester link at all but London, and other cities in the South. In this case, when Google crawls the car hire website, it will see internal links but a)which version and b) is there any way of sharing this link value around? Basically, we want to understand if Manchester in this case will get the benefit of an internal homepage link from Google even though we only show Manchester to people FROM Manchester, OR, do Google only give juice based on one version of the website, a generic UK version? Or to put it another way, is there any way of cashing in on both geo-targetting the customer based on their location AND getting link juice from those geo-specific home page links? Perhaps there is some code or way of telling Google that people from Manchester (a certain % of our visitors) will see a homepage internal link for Manchester that will pass some small % link value?
Search Behavior | | xoffie0 -
Vanish from google after choosing preferred domain and fixing 40 duplicate meta descriptions?
I recently followed 2 Google webmaster suggestions to clean up the on page SEO for our site. I chose a preferred domain 2 weeks ago(to www.website.com) and fixed the duplicate meta descriptions that our CMS was setting to unique and more natural descriptions for each page. I did that 3 days ago. Webmaster tools still says they are duplicates because it hasn't crawled the whole site yet. We have been fortunate enough to have some of our blog posts be covered by yahoo.com, cnet.com, huffingtonpost.com, gizmodo.com, etc. That is some major backlink juice and, as recently as 2 weeks ago, our website would be the #1 result when searching Google for "ourwebsite.com exact title of very popular blog post". Now it is on the 3rd page, and the top results are the websites that linked to our blog post. So....what gives? Is there a specific area I should look at? Our should I wait for Google to fully index our whole site now that changes have been made? It should be noted that our rankings have stayed the same in yahoo and bing. Any thoughts would be much appreciated.
Search Behavior | | garyislearning0 -
Visitors via Android App in Google Analytics
Hey there Mozzers! For one of our clients, we've developed an application on both Android and iOS. In the app, there is a link to the regular website. Can I see these visitors from the IOS/Android app in Google Analytics? Can I find them via Refferals? Thanks a lot in advance! Partouter
Search Behavior | | Partouter0 -
Pro/Cons of JUST using Google Analytics
I find myself in a situation where I am having to defend why purely relying on just Google Analytics for site data i.e. exit pages, keywords, bounce rate etc... is not good practise. So I thought/wondered if other people have come up against this. What are the Pro and Cons for ONLY using Google Analytics for your site data....
Search Behavior | | JohnW-UK0