Drop in direct traffic
-
Hi,
I help look after two websites and have been tracking traffic sources for a couple of years. I have noticed that both sites have seen a drop in direct traffic over 2 years. Has anyone else noticed this and do you have a hypothesis as to the reason?
Overall, on both sites traffic has increased.
Thanks,
Amelia
-
Thanks guys,
The niche for both sites is UK mortgages - one specialises in commercial and buy to let mortgages, the other residential mortgages. Neither subject is particularly interesting unless you're looking for one at the time - e.g. interesting when you want/need to finance your home purchase but not something most people care about once its all in place! Its a means to an end, and often the least 'fun' part of buying a home! We make it happen, but we're under no illusions that anyone wants a mortgage - they need one which is a different kettle of fish altogether. I don't think its something people come back to regularly - apart from the brief period of time when they are looking for a mortgage. (hope that makes sense?) So I personally would not expect a lot of direct traffic.
The quality / quantity of content hasn't changed - if anything our content writer has got even better as he's immersed himself in the subject more and more to be able to provide really insightful and interesting articles.
I am inclined to believe its the way google analytics is attributing visits as you've suggested. As far as I know nothing has been altered specifically, but I'll check this.
Thank you for answering.
Amelia
-
Amelia, it used to be that analytics would report traffic from URL shorteners as direct traffic.
I haven't checked lately, but it could be that is where some of your direct traffic has disappeared to, as Ray-pp suggests.
-
Have you compared the site traffic to the major algorithm updates? If not, check out this simple and free tool to do so easily: http://www.barracuda-digital.co.uk/panguin-tool/
That might give you some missing insight and immediate direction.
Edit for a better answer - duh, sorry you specifically mentioned 'direct traffic.'
When it comes to direct traffic, I immediately go to customer loyalty. Have you seen a decrease in the amount of purchases a customer is making (if ecommerce)?
If it is a content website - has the quality / quantity of posting decreased? It would help to know what the niches of the website are and how they add value to the visitor. But, I always think of loyalty when it comes to direct traffic.
Also, direct traffic includes not only visitors that type your URL in, but any errored or dropped referral URLs.It could be that you adjusted the way Analytics is tracking your traffic and it better understands which source to put the traffic into and report it properly. Sometimes, a decrease in traffic is a good thing.
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
-
Any solution to low search traffic on weekend
Hi. all, https://www.babyment.com is content website. our search traffic always shows a dip on weekend (friday to sunday), anyone has idea why it is like this? and is there a solution to this? or this is a just normal? Thank you.
Reporting & Analytics | | melvinwu0 -
Web traffic in steady decline since launching responsive design in July
The launch of the responsive design is the only event we can correlate to the beginning of the decline in overall visits to the website since July, however we're not sure if this is the issue. To give you some background, the website http://www.precisionpestcontrol.com.au/ is a pest control site in a highly competitive industry where there are many black hat tactics going on with huge keyword competition on a small range of keywords, however historically the website traffic for the above site has been gaining momentum. We create/ update 2 or 3 pages every month with rich content and post 8 blogs every month on pest control related topics. We have done the initial keyword research and all the keywords we used are medium to high volume terms. We don't do any black hat tactics or dodgy link building, we have invested time submitting the site to legitimate business listings in the past. It just seems strange that all of a sudden we go responsive and start to lose searchengine traffic. Possible Issues What we've been able to find so far were some pages that were not redirected properly, probably about 5, and 2 pages that seemed to lead to a 404 error. These have only just been fixed recently, otherwise the mobile site has been functioning effectively. Could this be the reason we have been in decline over the past few months? We also seem to have lost a whole lot of external links somehow, the external link measurement in MOZ has gone from 1500, up to 6,000 then down to 300 or so in the space of a few months. Basically we're trying to figure out what we're doing wrong, or what we can do to try and stop the decline of visits. We've checked the algorithm updates and don't think that Panda or the shift to the Google AI would have penalised us, but then again we could be wrong. Any advice anyone could offer would be hugely appreciated. Happy to provide any data for anyone to have a look at.
Reporting & Analytics | | Peter.Huxley590 -
Bing Referral Traffic
We do not get referral traffic from Google, only organic. Why do we get both organic and referral traffic from Bing?
Reporting & Analytics | | Mike.Bean0 -
Drop in google.com / referral trafic
Hi, On one of our sites (after the release of a new version, including redirections), we've seen a drop in referral trafic from google.fr (france). I know that this trafic usually comes from Google Images but it doesnt seem to be the case this time. The referal path is "/" and not "imgres" as it usually is when it comes from google images. The search trafic hasnt dropped tough... The site is a job listing site. We also saw a drop from indeed.com, I guess their crawler got lost in our new site... Any idea on the possible google site it could come from? Thank you,
Reporting & Analytics | | AdrienLargus0 -
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 -
Magic UVs - PPC landing pages delivering organic traffic by magic...
I have checked and double checked this. GA is showing over the last couple of weeks mysite.com/ppc/landingpage1 as a landing page for organic traffic, where it shouldn't. Main facts: The entire /ppc/ folder is blocked from the googlebot, and doesn't appear on any internal site maps. As far as I can tell, these pages have never been cached for the main index. I cannot recreate any of the organic searches myself (i.e. typing in keywords that triggered the traffic, even the almost unique long-tail ones). We just don't appear in the organic listings with these pages. The analytics and adwords accounts are linked. We are not paying for this mystery traffic through our PPC - these keywords are not appearing in our AdWords account (though other keywords / traffic are). The traffic is real - we have received phone calls from these pages, tracked to the visits recorded as organic These pages should only receive PPC traffic. They are receiving organic traffic also, but I can't recreate it. Can anyone suggest what's going on? I'm concerned about duplicate content issues and also skewing the analysis of the PPC campaign. Thanks
Reporting & Analytics | | RobPell0 -
Tips for migrating Google News traffic?
We are about to relaunch a site that gets a lot of Google News traffic. We are not changing domain, but the site structure is changing greatly, with the URLs of both news index pages and articles being shaken up. Obviously, we've 301-ed every page to its closest equivalent on the new site. We've also got a news sitemap. As we are not changing domain, is there anything further we need to do to help protect our Google News traffic. On a related note, does anyone have a relaible way of measuring traffic from Google News listings in universal search?
Reporting & Analytics | | Dennis-529610 -
Drop In Analytics
So I have a site that was getting about 200 hits (not a lot). They came to me and asked to do SEO. There were over 50 pages in HTML format so I created header/footers and changed the .html pages to .php. I set forwards up in the htaccess and everything. I did everything that I was suppose to. Now when I go to the analytics it almost looks like it lost all it's traffic from the keywords it was ranked in. Any ideas on why?
Reporting & Analytics | | blackrino0