Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Should Google Trends Match Organic Traffic to My Site?
-
When looking at Google Trends and my Organic Traffic (using GA) as percentages of their total yearly values I have a correlation of .47. This correlation doesn't seem right when you consider that Google Trends (which is showing relative search traffic data) should match up pretty strongly to your Organic Traffic.
Any thoughts on what might be going on? Why isn't Google Trends correlating with Organic Traffic? Shouldn't they be pulling from the same data set?
Thanks,
Jacob
-
Google's trends are for all searches happening for that keyword.
Unless you're the only website relevant for that keywords, odds are you're not going to even remotely match up to what Google says is " trending ".
Even for your brand name, when you search you don't just get your website, you get your facebook, youtube, BBB an anything else, even if others have a company named something likeminded.
So your website isn't the only thing to get that traffic, you'd get the majority of the traffic, so it's possible that the trends match somewhat but highly doubtful you'd match up even in the 90% range.
Another way to look at it is, Google is giving you a idea of how many people searched for a keyword, problem is, everyone doesn't use the same keywords to get the same results. This is even true with brand names, if you have a two word brand name, people might search with it all as one word, or mispells it, even butchers the name but still gets to the results. In that case you didn't see there trend data unless you looked it up, so thats some extra numbers your way.
It's more of a guide for you to gauge how popular a keyword is and high likely it is that people will be searching for that keyword. It's not really meant to be used as concrete data for organic traffic comparisons. That's what benchmarks and historical data is good for.
Hope my long winded explanation helped some.
-
I don't really understand what you're saying. Maybe I should have mentioned that the main term I'm looking up in Google Trends is our brand name and that we show up #1, and #3 for that term. We have for more than a year. So if Google Trends see's that, that specific keyword is increasing in search volume over the year, shouldn't we see similar trends with traffic coming from that keyword?
-
OMG! No!
If you would have earned #1 position from the beginning of Google, that would have been your best opportunity to have organic traffic that matched what you see in Google Trends. HOWEVER, Google has become, a better webmaster, more concerned about meeting shareholder expectations, and has begun modifying the format of the search results pages to keep you on their search pages for more page views, display more ads, display more ads at the top of the SERPs, increase shopping results income, make more money. So, if the #1 organic position, would have remained at the tippy-top of the SERPs for all of those years, then your traffic graph might be similar to Google trends. Instead, the reality is that your traffic graph would have shown either a much steeper decline or much less dramatic growth.
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
-
Organic traffic down
My 15 or so clients have all seen a drop in organic traffic by about 20% on GA4 for April. Rankings have not dropped or anything like that - so just wondering if anyone else has had similar?
Reporting & Analytics | | Contentcoms2 -
Dark Traffic Mystery!
Hey everyone, My team and I have been digging into this problem and can't find an answer - and it turns out this has been an issue for over year. I'll try to explain the best I can, but let me know if you have any questions. My predecessor noticed a non-existent page URL getting traffic in GA. He had the web dev team create a page so he could see where the traffic is coming from. The page has every directive under the sun on it; noindex, nofollow, noarchive, nosnippet, noodp, noydir, noimageindex, notranslate All of the traffic is (direct) / (none). It gets about 300 visits per day. Avg. time on page is 15:40, bounce rate is 99.6% and it doesn't show up in the funnel. Previous page path is 92% entrance; 8% homepage. Geo is 92% US; then diversified across countries. Browser is predominately Chrome. OS is only Windows, and device is only desktop. I've run this page through a backlink checker, and we get nothing. I've run it through Screaming Frog and it has no internal links pointing to it. I've tried putting quotes around the URL and googling it and we get a few websites, but they're very low authority and it isn't likely that they're sending 300+ visits per day. Also, since all of the traffic is direct, I don't think it's coming from a backlink anyway. This has become a personal quest for several of us, as we really want to figure out where that traffic is coming from. Any thoughts? What am I missing? It's kind of driving me crazy because I can't figure out what I've missed, so if anyone figures this out and is coming to Pubcon in November, I'll buy you a beer!! 🙂
Reporting & Analytics | | rachelmeyer0 -
Direct Traffic from Ashburn, VA
We've seen a huge spike in traffic form Ashburn, VA every Monday. It's wrecking our analytics. I don't want to create a filter based on location because we should receive legitimate traffic from that location. I see there are a few other identifiers that make me think I could add a filter for just those items (iOS 5, Safari). Does anyone have a current best-practice for this type of problem? Tx!
Reporting & Analytics | | fishlizzer2 -
SEO dealing with a CDN on a site.
This one is stumping me and I need some help. I have a client who's site is www.site.com and we have set them up a CDN through Max CDN at cdn.site.com which is basically a cname to the www.site.com site. The images in the GWT for www.site.com are de-indexing rapidly and the images on cdn.site.com are not indexing. In the Max CDN account I have the images from cdn.site.com sending a canonical header from www.site.com but that does not seem to help, they are all still de-indexing.
Reporting & Analytics | | LesleyPaone0 -
Is it possible to use Google Tag Manager to pass a user’s text input into a form field to Google analytics?
Hey Everyone, I finally figured out how to use auto event tracking with Google Tag Manager, but didn't get the data I wanted. I want to see what users are typing into the search field on my site (the URL structure of my site isn't set up properly to use GA's built-in site search tracking). So, I set up the form submit event tracking in Google Tag Manager and used the following as my event tracking parameters: Category: Search Action: Search Value When I test and look in Google Analytics I just see: "search" and "search value." I wanted to see the text that I searched on my site. Not just the Action and Category of the event.... Is what I'm trying to do even possible? Do I need to set up a different event tracking parameter? Thanks everyone!
Reporting & Analytics | | DaveGuyMan0 -
Referral Traffic vs. Campaign Traffic in Google Analytics
I have two sites: a blog and an ecommerce site. The blog funnels people to the ecommerce site. In Analytics I'm seeing declines in referral traffic from the blog to the ecommerce site. During the same time I'm seeing an increase in campaign traffic to the ecommerce site, with most campaign traffic coming from the blog. I believe the increase in campaign traffic is largely a result of simply having installed more tracking links. This leads me to believe that the declines I'm seeing in referral traffic is simply a result of the increase in campaign traffic. In other words, what was once counted and reported as being referral traffic is now being counted and reported as campaign traffic. So my question is this: In Google Analytics is campaign traffic ALSO reported as referral traffic, or is campaign traffic reported separately and not duplicated in referral traffic reports? I'll provide a concrete example to make this more clear in case it isn't: Say site X sends 1000 visits each month to site Y. Say 50 of those visits come from a single link on X. If that link is changed so that campaign Z data info added (via the Google URL Builder), would you expect to then see 950 referral visits each month from site X to site Y plus 50 campaign visits to site Y via new campaign Z, or would you continue to see 1000 referral visits plus the new 50 campaign visits? Many thanks in advance to anyone that can shed some light on this.
Reporting & Analytics | | aaronprimal0 -
Google Analytics Organic Search Keywords Suddenly Displaying FulL Urls
In my Google Analytics, the top keywords for Organic Search are suddenyl displaying full URLs. For example, now the third and fourth keywords are http://www.domain.com/highly-specific-URL. These have all started recently around the same day, July 12th. I've checked back, and we've made no internal changes to the site around that time that could affect this. Any thoughts on this? Thanks! P.S. It might be related to rich snippets, but I cannot tell at this point.
Reporting & Analytics | | 10SL0 -
No Social Sources in Google Analytics - what am I doing wrong?
Hello Everyone, I'm having a strange issue: I DO NOT have in my Google Analytics the "Social" tab under the Traffic Sources category. Look at the first image of this post: http://marketingland.com/google-analytics-social-reports-8138 How do you "get" that to show? Hope somebody has this issue and can help, Thanks a lot, Alex
Reporting & Analytics | | pwpaneuro0