Why would page views per visitor suddenly increase?
-
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.
-
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
-
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.
-
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.
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
-
Strange - Search Console page indexing "../Detected" as 404
Anyone seen this lately? All of a sudden Google Search Console is insisting in Page indexing that there is a 404 for a page that has never existed on our client's site: https://........com.au/Detected We've noticed this across a number of sites, precisely in this way with a capitalised "/Detected" To me it looks like something spammy is being submitted to the SERPs (somehow) and Google is trying to index that and then getting a 404. Naturally MOZ isn't picking it up, cause the page simply never existed - it's just happening in Search Console 2afc7e35-71e4-4e25-80a3-690bf10776a7.png It comes and it goes in the 404 alerts in Console and is really annoying. I reckon it started happening late 2022.
Reporting & Analytics | | DanielDL0 -
Google Analytics-Unique visitors?
Does organic search data show unique visitors or all visits? For example, if someone ( a single person) visits my site multiple times after searching the same keyword phrase, does that show in my analytics data as 1 hit from that keyword, or all hits? Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | RickyShockley0 -
Calculating page visit duration for bounced visits?
IS there any way on Google Analytics to calculate page visit duration for bounced visits? if so, what would need to be done?
Reporting & Analytics | | offthemaptravels0 -
Please Give This Page a Good Ass Kicking
This page on my site has a high bounce rate (around 90%) despite being right on point for the search queries that lead visitors to it (i.e. keyword data shows visitors are searching for this information exactly). Also, Google keeps giving the page good placement and it receives a good bit of traffic. Anyone have thoughts as to why the bounce rate is so high? Feel free to offer candid criticism.
Reporting & Analytics | | JSOC0 -
Time on page: What happens when I open many tabs?
Hello everyone, I was studying Analytics, and checked that the time on page is calculated by the diference of the time you entered the page and when you click to go to another one. But how the time is calculated when I open several links using new tabs in different moments? Does Google counts the last tab? Just a guess... Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | seomasterbrasil0 -
Page Rank Decline in Webmaster Tools
Hello Forum, My team and I just got through completely redoing an eCommerce website for a yoga company and I noticed that in Google Webmaster Tools our site's average daily position changed from ~25 to ~40 in the last 5-6 days (during this time period we submitted our sitemap). I exported the Webmaster Tools results and found a high number of new keywords (which weren't there pre-launch) related to yoga. However, these keywords are not related to the products we sell. Several of these keywords have positions of 240 or higher and are skewing our avg page rank. These terms include words like "cricket logo," "animal yoga," "dog pose," "cat yoga," We did move our blog into our domain name now and there are some articles related to animal poses. Any thoughts as to what may be going on? Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | pano0 -
How do I set up Google Analytics to track paid visitors from Bing
When looking at Traffic Sources in Google Analytics, Google is broken out into paid and organic visits. I want to do the same with Bing. How do I do it?
Reporting & Analytics | | cpantages0