Google Analytics shows wrong traffic source
-
I was reviewing out traffic sources on GA for this past week's traffic history, and noticed a couple of visits & conversions that GA cited as coming from campaigns from emails that were sent out in 2012 and early 2013. it seems odd that we would have traffic & conversions from these older campaigns - on a regular basis. it's not even from one campaign, but from multiple campaigns.
is it possible that it is a cookie issue? - i wonder if these visits were really from the email campaigns - or if they were from organic searches or other sources.
Thoughts?
Thanks!
-
Thank you so much! This makes sense now. Def. a great thing that they're loyal customers. Now I know I can just attribute it to direct, this helps me better track actual campaigns.
-
Hi Sara,
It could be a cookie issue if these visitors are originally arriving through a mail link and then revisiting directly. Direct visits do not overwrite the campaign/source cookie on the users computer so the visit is attributed to whichever source last brought them to your site which was recorded. So you could have a click from a mail link, and then 10 direct visits from the same user and this would show as 11 visits from a mail link. Campaign sources are updated when the user arrives through organic search, a referral site or a tagged campaign link (mail, ppc etc) but not when a direct visit is recorded with an existing cookie value (which btw has a 6 month lifespan). Check here for the techy bit, half way down the page at 'What Causes Updates to the __utmz Campaign Cookie?' https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/2731565?hl=en
There could be a couple of other outlying scenarios (users bookmark the page from a mail link with the utm values still in the url for example) but I think the direct visits are probably the bulk of the numbers you are seeing. The flip side is that these are usually pretty dedicated customers to your brand, hence the conversions, so things are looking good
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
-
Moving our Google Analytics Account to a New Account
My company is building a new website with a new web development company. Our old website development company hosted our Google Analytics account on their account (this was done 13+ years ago, probably a good idea then, but we definitely would've done it differently knowing what we know now). I've been researching how we could move our GA property to a new account owned by us, but according to this article: "There are some circumstances in which you cannot move a property:
Reporting & Analytics | | GreatLegalMarketing
-> The source account and the destination account are not in the same Google Marketing Platform organization. Contact an organization admin to make sure both accounts belong to the same organization." In our case, the source account and the destination account do not belong to the same organization. I may just have to accept that we are losing 13+ years of historical data about our website, and if that's the case, oh well. But, if anyone has an idea how we can export/import our GA data to our new analytics account, I would greatly appreciate it.0 -
How to set and understand behavior flow in google analytic?
Hello Experts, How to set and understand behavior flow in google analytic? I have attached screenshot of my behavior flow it is showing not set. So how to set? Thanks! MAQnG SQ7QM
Reporting & Analytics | | micey1230 -
Tracking in Google Analytics
My site has just recently (or maybe not so recently...) had a great deal of https URL's indexed (I was really only able to find this out thanks to the recent update to the GWT Index Status). It appears that Googlebot picked up an ssl somewhere (I already know where) on my site and then proceeded to crawl and index pages with https rather than http. Since I understand the issue, it should be an easy fix. My question is, does Google Analytics support (track) both http AND https for one site, or would I need to set up two different tracking codes for http and https? I figured that I might as well grab some data from the https pages that are indexed before I try and remove them. I've done a little research on using Groupings/Groups but I figured I would reach out to the MOZ community to see if anyone else has worked with a similar issue. Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | GalcoIndustrial0 -
Google Analytics - Not provided info
Morning all, i am using Google analytics for some time now, One of the issues that i don't have a clear answer for is, when i am looking at Traffic Source --> overview In the Keyword column, that is a line (not provided) What we think here is that we cant see the keywords if someone arrived to our website but was logged-in to Google account Is this correct? is there a way to find the keywords behind this (not provided)? - i have many visits for this line (17.3% of all visits) and i don't know which keywords people used. Thank you SeoWise
Reporting & Analytics | | iivgi0 -
Alternatives for google analytics multi account dashboard overview
Hi there, I like the new Google Analytics layout don't get me wrong but I really miss the old possibility to have a quick overview of all your accounts. Does anyone know an alternative for this? Please share your experiences and recommendations.
Reporting & Analytics | | Robbern0 -
Keep multiple Google Analytic / Webmaster accounts seperate?
Hi, I have a paranoid suspicion that putting all my websites on one Webmaster / Analytic account will mean any links between my sites won't carry any weight, and Google might consider similar content much more readily if 2 of my sites are in the same market. So I have about 4 different accounts with my main sites split across them. Am I being over paranoid? Do any of you have any problem with all your sites being on the same account?
Reporting & Analytics | | SpecialCase0 -
Google Analytics - my continuing adventures
Hello I'd appreciate views of the various metrics I'm struggling with in GA: I've run 2 different reports that provide 2 different outputs. 1. In Standard Reporting you can report in Traffic Sources on Organic Search by Keyword, which returns the number of Visits. 2. In Custom Reporting you can define the Keyword dimension and the Organic Searches metric, which returns the number of Organic Searches. This returns 2 different numbers. For example, over the last month for a given term report 1 returns 77,306 visits whilst report 2 returns 52,589 organic searches. I have found some definitions: "Visits represent the number of individual sessions initiated by all the visitors to your site." "Organic Searches: number of organic searches that happened within a session. This metric is search engine agnostic." My understanding of these definitions is that report 2 should return a larger value than report 1 rather than what is happening (i.e. report 1 returns a greater value than report 2). Does anyone have a greater understanding of what these mean and relate to? Does anyone have any views on which metric is more useful? Thanks Neil
Reporting & Analytics | | mccormackmorrison0 -
Tracking Required Form Fields in Google Analytics
I tried searching for this elsewhere but am having a hard time finding a good answer. Is it possible to track the effect of required form fields on conversions in Google Analytics? In other words, how do I track whether or not more/less people fill out a form if I make "Last Name" a required field? Thanks 🙂
Reporting & Analytics | | kylesuss0