Spike then Drop in Direct Traffic?
-
We've been doing some SEO work over the last few weeks and earlier this week we saw a large spike in traffic. Yay we all thought, but then yesterday the traffic levels returned to pre-celebratory levels.
I've been doing some digging to try and find out what was different Monday and Tuesday this week. Mondays are usually big traffic days for us anyway, but this week was by far the biggest, and Tuesday was even higher still, our best day ever.
After some poking, I found that the direct traffic followed the same pattern as our overall traffic levels (image attached). The first spike coincides with an email we sent out that day, but the later spike we just don't know where it came from?
I understand loosely that direct isn't easily traceable, but can anyone help us understand more about this second spike?
Thanks!
-
You might want to check if you have spam in your reports, especially this referral free-social-buttons. This referral spam hits with direct visit along with the referral part.
The problem of this spam over others is that even if you filter the referral you will keep getting the fake direct visits, but luckily there is a solution, if you check the hostname that these direct visits use you will see that is not set or it's fake as any Ghost Spam in Google Analytic, so they way to stop this type of spam in any form(referral, keyword or direct) is to create a valid hostname filter that will only allow valid traffic. You can check full details of this issue in this article:
http://www.ohow.co/unusual-increase-in-direct-traffic-on-ga-spam/
-
Hi Kyle,
Thanks for responding.
We found it was from Miami after some digging around in Analytics and sorting by location.
No drop in traffic organically, just our usual organic combined with direct gives us a huge spike, but direct from Miami isn't much use for us!
-
I seem to have the same issue on my site. I get a sudden influx of visitors within minutes all coming from direct traffic. How did you discover the traffic was from Miami? The only identifying factor I could find in GA was that the Network Domain for the traffic was 1e100.net. Not sure how sending direct traffic would benefit a spammer.
Have you experienced an overall drop in traffic on days you get the huge spike in direct traffic? I feel like I do, maybe the high bounce rate is a problem and signal to Google?
Would be nice to block the traffic but possibly just filter it from GA to avoid skewed data if it is not affecting your site.
-
Ok, so I've been doing some digging and I've found the cause, just not the answer.
The additional traffic came in at 9am from Miami... Our website has nothing to do with Miami and 9am would be 3am local time.
It still doesn't look like anything spammy but still, where can I go from here to find the cause of Miami traffic coming to our site?
Thanks!
-
With it being over a week since your email was sent I don't think the two events are related, the pattern we see from our emails see an initial spike and a much smaller spike the Monday of the following week due to out of offices etc.
If your certain its direct traffic then I would be investigating further with analytics. The spike is at a time you normally experience spikes, is this coincidence or a pattern?
In our marketing department we try to paint a picture of our direct traffic users.
Which page are they landing on, what are they doing, where is the user located, are the visits resulting in more bookings/services being orders. Then consider external factors which may cause people to go looking more.
For example, one company I work with here in the UK see a jump in direct traffic correlating with the end of the financial year and tax refunds.
As SMG said, Behaviour and Acquisition tabs are your friend. Sorry its not more of an "answer" but direct traffic can be vague.
-
Thank you for your reply.
Apologies, here's some more info:
Our increase in traffic overall was much higher than normal, but in Analytics when we view just direct, this seems to be the cause of the additional traffic. Organic did not spike.
It is a website for a car dealership containing many brands. The website is fairly large, around 1,000 pages with another 1,000 used cars which are fed in every morning with updates (cars sold, new cars added etc).
Mondays are normally busy days as customers like to book test drives/services etc ready for the following weekend.
Thank you.
-
Harry, Could you provide a little more info/clarify a few things?
You stated that your direct traffic on the spike day followed the same overall pattern as a normal day etc... but you haven't clarified if the spike was all direct traffic.
Was this spike definitely direct traffic?
Also I think its beneficial for us to know (so we can look at factors that might influence direct traffic)
What Industry / Type of website is it?
Why are Mondays normally big traffic days? -
Thanks for your reply Jimmy.
We didn't send any emails out on our second spike, which is why we're confused.
The landing pages don't look any different from what we'd expect day-to-day - Nothing that really stands out.
Thanks
-
Hi there,
To get a better idea of your traffic you really need to dig into the Acquisition and Behaviour tabs in Google Analytics.
If you are saying it was a mystery spike in direct traffic, have you checked what the landing pages are? Google translates and the web archive can appear in direct traffic, but are distinguishable from their landing pages.Did you check that traffic from your email was being reported correctly? Sometimes email can be seen as direct traffic if the email doesn't report the referral, so it is worth checking.
Hopefully this gives you a starting point for further investigation!
King Regards
Jimmy
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
-
Using Similar Expired URLs to Send Traffic to My Site
Thanks in advance for any help! I have an existing website with content on a particular topic. I have discovered a few similar expired URLs that might still get some traffic. One in particular still has a number of valid links from other sites. Would it make sense for me to buy those URLs (which are really cheap) and just use them to send that traffic to my site? If so, am I better using a 301 redirect or having a home page on the new site that just mentions that the old site is expired, and that they might want to instead link over to my site?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | alanjosephs0 -
Is there anything I need to worry about if... We show/hide header navigation based upon visit from external traffic?
Scenario: So imagine if LinkedIn turned off their main navigation/header if you landed on your personal profile via a search engine or via an external link. But if you were on LinkedIn when you found it, the navigation remains the same.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mysitesrock0 -
DA dropped 7 pts in one week as well as our competitors. Is something going on?
We have consistently had a 70 in DA and now all of the sudden we are at a 63 as well as seeing the same considerable drop among our competitors. This was odd as I have not seen this type of drop in DA since being with the company. Any ideas are appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WeaverMike0 -
Will I lose traffic from Google for re-directing a page?
I’m currently planning to a retire a discontinued product and put a 301 redirect to a related product (although not identical). The thing is, I’m still getting significant traffic from people searching for the old product by name. Would Google send this traffic to the new pages via the re-direct? Is Google likely to display the new page in place of the old page for similar queries or will it serve other content? I’d like to answer this question so that I can decide between the two following approaches: 1) Retiring the old page immediately and putting a 301 redirect to the new related pages. This will have the advantage of transferring the value of any link signals / referring traffic. Traffic will also land on the new pages directly without having to click through from another page. We would have a dynamic message telling users that the old product had been retired depending on whether they had visited out site before. 2) Keep the old product pages temporarily so that we don’t lose the traffic from the search engines. We would then change the old pages to advise users that the old product was now retired, but that we have other products that might solve their problems. When this organic traffic decreases over time, then we will proceed with the re-direct as above. I am worried though that the old product pages might outrank the new product pages. I’d really appreciate some advice with this. I’ve been reading lots of articles, but it seems like there are different opinions on this. I understand that I will lose between 10% - 15% of page rank as per the Matt Cutts video.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RG_SEO0 -
Big Drop in Traffic, No change in Position
Penguin 2.0 was a great update for one of my biggest client. A website that was using terrible black hat techniques and ranked first on the most important keyword in my clients niche got kickt from the SERP's and my client jumped from 4th to 1st. The jump in traffic was enormous and on top of that 5% of the traffic converted instead of the usual 2,5%- 3% on other traffic. Untill July 2nd. Traffic from the keyword dropped by 80% while we were still in position 1, after a lot of digging I thaught I found what caused it, Google booted the keyword from their autofill. My question is if anyone has seen a removal from tthe autocomplete making that big of a difference in search volume.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Laurensvda1 -
Rankings dropped off a cliff. Webmaster tools message: No manual spam actions found. Now what?
A week ago my rankings for http://www.top-10-dating-reviews.com (some adult content) dropped and I'm now getting now impressions. I submitted a reconsideration request as I was sure I hadn't violated any rules and today the reply was that no manual spam actions were found. Te email goes onto say there are a variety of other things that could affect rankings such as site architecture, not being able to crawl and algo changes. As far as I'm aware all these issues are fine. I'm not aware of any algo updates last weekend. my question is what can I do now? I need to get my rankings back but there's nothing wrong with my site or practices.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SamCUK0 -
Help! My Domain Authority keeps dropping! What do I do?
Hey! I just noticed my Domain Authority keeps dropping? What's happening? What do I do to get it better. I'm scared and dont know the next move to make to get this site better. Help please! Thanks! http://www.moondoggieinc.com Kristy O
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KristyO1 -
Optimisation change caused a drop
We are a web design company and SEO has never been our main thing but we can do it for clients quite well. We were ranking under web design and our location quite well up until 3 months ago. We didn't really have much on our page for web design but targetted website design instead. Our SEO guy who has proved himself for getting some of our clients to the top of Google under very generic search terms recommended we focus on Web Design, so I changed the site accordingly. 2 days later Google has seen our changes and now we've changed our H1 and copy. However, our ranking has dropped 1 place yet again. Obviously I've now panicked and am stressing (even feeling sick) about what to do. He is away until next week so I can't ask him. Could it be that Google has seen we're targetting the word and pushed us down? Shall I wait for the link building he's doing? My own link building lately seems to knock us down a place with every new link I'm doing (and I'm only adding the odd link - not spamming at all). What's odd is that we're still doing extremely well for keywords that aren't even mentioned in our copy at all really. If you could help or offer advice I'd be very grateful.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sanchez19600