Mobile redirect causing traffic drop? Can I move analytics code to capture them as visitors before redirecting them?
-
Yesterday I implemented a mobile redirect as I don't have a mobile version of my site. As a result I've seen a drop in traffic which makes sense as my redirect script is at the top of the page. If I were to move the redirect script below the analytics code would that allow me to still track mobile users? Would this affect my bounce rate though?
-
Yes, the "drop" in traffic (or drop in reported traffic) is because the analytics code doesn't have time to kick in before the redirect script takes over.
If you were to move the refresh script to the bottom of the code and the analytics to the top, the likelihood of reversing this goes up. We had a similar problem with a client site in that they had a very heavy piece of conversion optimisation software running at the top of the code and our tracking code at the bottom. Users clicking from search to the home page usually knew where they wanted to go quite quickly, and would click away before our tracking code had loaded. Client was desperate to know why our SEO traffic had gone through the floor. It had not. We had them reverse the analytics and CRO codes and our traffic "came back".
JS is executed in the order it's included in the code, so moving it should work. Should being the key word - I am not 100% on this.
I am not sure how to place a delay with JS so hopefully someone else can chime in on that one. Meta refreshes allow a short time delay - does anyone know what the correct way to do this for solely mobile traffic would be? Acknowledging that meta refreshes are not recommended for SEO, but they are a popular way of defining a short delay in redirecting a user.
-
The mobile site is not operated by me unfortunately.
-
Why you not add the analytics code to the mobile site too? The actual market of mobile phones runs JS without problems.
-
Uh, hard to say as you need to do it in the script you're including ;-). Can you send me the URL of the JS (or via PM, whatever you prefer)?
-
Thanks for your reply. How would I add a delay to this code?
-
Hi Sam,
If you're doing the redirect with a JavaScript solution then the answer would be yes. Put you would need a delay of 1-2 seconds to make sure the GA tracking code is initialized.
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
-
Can the end of a competition cause a drop in organic visitors?
Hi everyone, Over the last six months I've been running a few competitions on my largest site, but noticed a very large decrease in organic sessions just after the third one ended. For reference, the site is ~10 years old and gets a couple of million sessions per month.Organic sessions throughout last year and before the holiday periods were around 800k/month, which then increased by 50% during the holiday period alongside a competition I ran.These competitions double the pages per session and add another 1.5 minutes onto session duration. At the end of one of the competitions this year, daily organic sessions halved overnight and are now below the baseline of last year - and not improving. Some possible causes include; Google update - unlikely, because the date of the drop doesn't coincide with any increase in SERP volatility that I can find The extremely quick overnight drop in engagement (pages/session and session duration falling back to pre-comp baseline) caused Google to believe our site to be less popular and thus less deserving of rankings Visitors who've been bombarded with month-long competitions are sick of seeing them and are not searching for my site so often Email tagging - in the week before, UTM tracking parameters were added to all emails (of which there are a lot of subscribers) - as the number of Email visitors in Analytics increased, Organic did slightly decrease at the same time. I think this is unlikely, but I wonder if somehow some of our email visitors were previously being classed as Organic as well as some being Direct Incorrectly tagged as Direct - at the same time as the organic drop, Direct traffic doubled - it has since decreased back to just above the Direct baseline, however Organic has not improved I'd just be interested to know if anyone has any experience with something similar happening and, if so, what do you think the cause was and how did you rectify it? Thank you very much for your input in advance!
Reporting & Analytics | | serges780 -
Main Website Redirects to Mobile Website, Mobile Website counts this as direct traffic, is there a way to tell what the source/medium is?
Hello, The situation is that someone is arriving on my main website https://www.example.com and being redirected to http://m.example.com. When this happens my analytics says that the traffic is all direct coming to my mobile site. However, I know people clicking on my google cpc, and some google organic users are hitting the main website and being redirected. Before we didn't have as good of a redirect on our main website so I could tell organic and cpc traffic coming in, now my main website has a huge drop in these categories because they are redirecting to mobile but I can't tell on my mobile how much traffic from each is going to the mobile site. Is there a way to fix this? Is it because my main website is https:// and mobile is a http:// (as I know that sometimes makes traffic direct) or is it a bigger problem that can't be resolved? Thanks
Reporting & Analytics | | oxfordseminars0 -
New e-commerce launched, drop in traffic
One of our clients launched a new e-commerce site and there was a significant (60%) drop in traffic in Google Analytics following the launch. We are about 10 days into the new site, and our suspicion is that the move has caused a decrease in their site authority which has lowered their search position. The old site had the store at sitename.com/store. The new site has a Shopify store at shop.sitename.com. There were very few external followed links to the store pages, so we thought that there would be little effect for overall site traffic by moving the store to a subdomain. Any recommendations for next steps on diagnosing the problem and working towards a solution?
Reporting & Analytics | | DesignHammer0 -
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 -
How can I track my rankings on Google Images?
I noticed a small amount of traffic coming from a particular very generic keyword. Being pleasantly surprised that we are ranking for this, and after some digging, I found that we are actually ranking in Google images, rather than in the web results. How can I track whether other keywords are ranking in Google images? I use Rank Checker to track keywords in the main web results, but this doesn't have a function for Google Images. Help please - thanks.
Reporting & Analytics | | TheJewelleryEd0 -
Tag Manager & Universal Analytics Code - Do you need both?
Hi Mozzers I've created a container for a domain in Google Tag Manager. Within that container I've created a tag for universal analytics with track type "Page view" and the firing rule "all pages". Can I then replace the Universal Analytics code with the tag manager code? Would it still track all the normal data in Google Analytics? There are no events setup up yet so that's not a concern but there are goals setup tracking which are triggered by a page view. Would they be affected? Thanks Anthony
Reporting & Analytics | | Tone_Agency1 -
Google Analytics - Keywords (not set) or ( not provided) WHY???
In Analytics, most of my visitors are landing on my home page, but when trying to see wich keywords they use, most of them are: (not set) or ( not provided) See screencast: http://screencast.com/t/AKwPW76qLVsN Can you tell why? What is going on? Is there a way to solve this? Thank you, BigBlaze
Reporting & Analytics | | BigBlaze2050 -
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