Why would page views per visitor suddenly increase?

[Zippy-Bungle]

My website traffic is growing by about 1% a week. It has a fairly stable page views/visitor of about 1.69. There's normally very little variability in this As we sell an industrial product.

Today page views jumped by 50% and so did page views/visitor but visitor numbers stayed the same.

I dont have a useful hypothesis to explain this. Analytics shows me that the traffic source, country of origin and pages viewed are pretty much the same as normal. There's been no substantive change to the site (today we changed the text in a widget to link to a new page - and no one visited it). It doesn't look like 1 person has gone through the whole site as that would skew the distribution of page views by country

So why would user behavour suddenly change? I'll look at it for the rest of the week but in 7 years of looking after this website I haven't seen anything like this before.

[DirkC]

If you see a sudden change in Analytics it's very often related to a problem with the tracking code. You could install the Analytics plugin for Chrome & check your pages. It could be the same visit is tracked twice - as Bill says - check the bouncerate. If this has significantly decreased it's almost certain a tracking issue.

You could  check that you don't have a meta refresh or something similar which could artificially boost your page views.

Hope this helps

Dirk

[EGOL]

hmm...  It could be someone manually grabbing your content.... or a robot such as qualys that is visible to your analytics.

I've had both.

[BCutrer]

One thought is to Check your GA code, sometimes we see sites (mostly Wordpress) accidentally install the old code and new code on the same page and get wacky metrics like that. If that is the case you should see an extremely low bounce rate.