Sudden Drop in Direct Traffic
-
We recently had a some changes to our site, adding new sub categories, moving products around, etc...
We implemented the changes on Thursday of last week and had a normal day around 800+ visitors. The very next day our # of visitors dropped in half to around 400+ and has stayed that way all weekend.
I thought it might be that some links may have changed but I checked all of the links and they are the same as before with the exception of new pages. I checked to make sure that the google analytics code was still in the code and it is.
I read that it could be DNS propagation timing issue but it's been 3 days and nothing's changed.
I'm fairly certain that we are not being penalized or pandalized by google as our referrals and organic search results have not changed only the amount of direct traffic.
Anyone have any ideas on what to look at or what to do?
-
I would work on other things for a few days.
If your sales or other conversions are holding up then don't worry.
Fewer spiders can be a good thing. You can go into webmaster tools to see if google is still visiting (look under crawl stats).
-
thanks for the responses! all good things to know.
at what point should I start to worry?
-
A lot of analytics programs include robot visits in the direct traffic. Could simply be fewer scrapers or a change in spidering patterns.
If your conversions are holding up I would not worry about this.
-
Yup, I mean direct traffic. The referral traffic and traffic from search has stayed at normal levels. Only our direct traffic has dropped.
Our rankings have not fallen.
It is possible that our URLs were modified without proper redirects but I doubt it. The URLs that existed before the changes are the same, the only ones that have changed are the ones we either removed (obsolete categories) or newly created.
What other pieces of information should I provide to give you a better idea?
-
Sudden Drop in Direct Traffic....
Do you really mean direct - like people typing in your URL or using bookmarks? Or, are you asking about total traffic from search and other sources?
Anyone have any ideas on what to look at or what to do?
You have access to more information than we do. Check your analytics to see where your site has lost traffic.
Have your rankings fallen?
When your site was modified were URLs changed without redirects?
You have not provided enough information for anything other than guesses from 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
-
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 -
How accurate is Google analytics at measuring traffic? (Free version)
Hi Guys. When we compare our actual sales to Google analytics conversions it can be way out. Sometimes as much as 50%. Is this the same for the data on traffic? And if so, does the data tend to be out by a similar amount over time? i.e) If we compare this year and last year it give us a good indicator of differences in traffic volume? (albeit not 100% accurate?) Thanks. Isaac.
Reporting & Analytics | | isaac6630 -
How do I find out where my "direct traffic" came from?
Last weekend we had a significant rise in traffic to our site. Digging in to Google Analytics, most of it has come from the USA, with some from Canada, Australia and a few other countries. It has all gone to the same article on our website. I have also found that it has mostly come from Safari (in app), on an ipad and iphone. Google Analytics has put this down as Direct traffic. My feeling is that it is not. Could it be from a social media app - perhaps someone with many followers has pinned from our site, or something along these lines. Could it actually be organic search traffic and Google misattributing it as Direct? Bounce rate and time on site is fine, so I don't think it's a bot / spam.
Reporting & Analytics | | TheJewelleryEd
Any ideas / places I could go to help me find out would be appreciated, thank you. Joss0 -
How to check search engine and direct traffic of Mobile?
Hi Guys, I want to check search engine traffic or direct traffic of mobile, how to check in google analytic?
Reporting & Analytics | | varo0 -
Looking for a GA developer to block internal traffic and integrate with Snipcart JS API - paid
Hi There, We're looking for someone to help us setup: Blocking internal traffic using a custom dimension/query URL as described here: http://www.simoahava.com/analytics/block-internal-traffic-gtm/ Integrate Google Analytics ecommerce tracking with the Snipcart API as described here: https://snipcart.com/blog/integrating-snipcart-with-google-analytics-ecommerce-tracking Discuss Kiss Metrics and possibly integrate with Snipcart We're a small, 2 person startup so are ideally looking for a freelancer or small firm to help - Any recommendations or pointers in the right direction would be much appreciated. Cheers Ben
Reporting & Analytics | | cmscss0 -
Strange Spike in Direct / None traffic
Over the past week or so, my client's Australian personal training website has experienced a dramatic spike in Google Analytics sessions (see attached screenshot). All the visits are coming from various states in the US and via the "Direct / None" source. All the visits are less than 1 second in duration so I'm assuming it's coming from some sort of automated bots. I'm worried for a couple of reasons: A) Could somebody be deliberately spamming the site to adversely affect our rankings? B) How do I get rid of this traffic from our analytics reports? 7kwsJnB
Reporting & Analytics | | Dave_Eddy0 -
Direct Traffic Spike
In February, I transferred an HTML site to a WordPress Platform. Since then, Direct traffic has spiked to nearly 400% since the WordPress transition. The Direct traffic spike took roughly 2 months before it started to kick in. Does anyone know what this could be attributed to?
Reporting & Analytics | | SteveZero120 -
301 redirects reduce traffic considerably
I recently identified an issue with our site whereby we had three different URL types for each article. As an example, we might have something like: /articles/my-article-name /articles/my-article-name.aspx /articles/My-Article-Name We've since taken action to address this by implement 301 redirects from the second and third formats to the first (so everything is without the .aspx extension and is in lower case). But the results have been disconcerting. Before the change, one of our articles receives 150 or so hits per day via the .aspx version. The other two existed but had very low traffic (1-3 per day). We decided the non .aspx and lowercase version was the version we wanted. Sure enough, when we introduced the 301 redirects on September 25th the traffic for the .aspx version just stopped (after a day) and the traffic for the non-.aspx version climbed. But not enough. After the change, the non-.aspx version is receiving about 60-70% of the traffic that we used to have on the .aspx version. So, instead of receiving 150 per day (to the .aspx version) we are receiving around 100 or so to the non-.aspx version. This pattern has occured across all our articles and, as a result, our site-wide traffic has dropped by about 40% or so. Since we are using 301 redirects I had assumed that the search engines would just update to reflect the non-.aspx version. I am sure I am missing something here. Any help would be most appreciated. Thanks. Mark
Reporting & Analytics | | MarkWill0