Sudden increase in returning visitors
-
Hi,
in the last couple of days I've seen the following changes in my analytics:
-
about 35% increase in overall traffic(both organic and ppc)
-
new visitors dropped about 20%(both organic and ppc)
-
bounce rate increased in about 10%(both organic and ppc)
I haven't done any changes to the analytics code nor any other big change to the website.
I'm obviously pleased with the increase in traffic but worried about the fact that it is mostly from returning visitors.
I just want to make sure that nothing went bad so I can catch this on time, any advice on what to look for would be great.Thanks,
Asaf
-
-
right now I am using "absolutely unique visitors" as my gauge. Not perfect, but it will have to do.
-
right now I am using "absolutely unique visitors" as my gauge. Not perfect, but it will have to do.
-
I think they have a huge issue with sessions now.
based on people's comments, the change seems to be rather big and renders the results almost useless. I guess if It's going to stay that way I should learn how to read the new results.
-
Yes.. this would have been nice. However I believe they think there is little to no change. I use Joomla on the site that has problems and I am curious if Joomla's sessions are conflicting... I went from 90% new visits to 70% visits. Now I use a calculator to see what my old traffic was.
From what I can see, with some users it is counting each page view as a visit. If someone comes to my site searching like "how to build a red widget" and I see 15 visits. I know there is not 15 people that search this term. Rather the sessions are screwy. Not sure if this is a Google fix, or something on my part yet.
-
well it is a change: http://analytics.blogspot.com/
apparently on 11/8 Google has changed they way they close sessions.
and I'm way out of they're 1% change - "this change may slightly increase the number of visits"
they could have sent a simple mail.........
-
I am experiencing it too... it looks like GA changed how they look at sessions. This is the problem I assume. It is really throwing off my numbers. I am curious if it is a CMS thing.
-
Usually I don't have a lot of traffic
Organic search was
a couple of days ago(very much average)
39 visits - 76.92% new visits - 20.51% bounce rate
today (till now):
72 visits - 50.00% new visits - 62.50% bounce rate
-
How much traffic do you have? Could it just be a large fluctuation?
-
It's an adult novelty store,
and there is currently a valentines day like event here but the keywords that bring in the traffic are also not directly related to this event and the fact that the bounce rate has increased on these terms alerted me.
but maybe I should wait a couple of days and see
-
What is the topic of your site? Are there any real-world events going on related to your site that could explain this change in traffic?
Are there any seasonal factors for your site? Any sales or discounts? Is your site in any way related to "back to school" activities?
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
-
Can the end of a competition cause a drop in organic visitors?
Hi everyone, Over the last six months I've been running a few competitions on my largest site, but noticed a very large decrease in organic sessions just after the third one ended. For reference, the site is ~10 years old and gets a couple of million sessions per month.Organic sessions throughout last year and before the holiday periods were around 800k/month, which then increased by 50% during the holiday period alongside a competition I ran.These competitions double the pages per session and add another 1.5 minutes onto session duration. At the end of one of the competitions this year, daily organic sessions halved overnight and are now below the baseline of last year - and not improving. Some possible causes include; Google update - unlikely, because the date of the drop doesn't coincide with any increase in SERP volatility that I can find The extremely quick overnight drop in engagement (pages/session and session duration falling back to pre-comp baseline) caused Google to believe our site to be less popular and thus less deserving of rankings Visitors who've been bombarded with month-long competitions are sick of seeing them and are not searching for my site so often Email tagging - in the week before, UTM tracking parameters were added to all emails (of which there are a lot of subscribers) - as the number of Email visitors in Analytics increased, Organic did slightly decrease at the same time. I think this is unlikely, but I wonder if somehow some of our email visitors were previously being classed as Organic as well as some being Direct Incorrectly tagged as Direct - at the same time as the organic drop, Direct traffic doubled - it has since decreased back to just above the Direct baseline, however Organic has not improved I'd just be interested to know if anyone has any experience with something similar happening and, if so, what do you think the cause was and how did you rectify it? Thank you very much for your input in advance!
Reporting & Analytics | | serges780 -
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.
Reporting & Analytics | | Zippy-Bungle0 -
Mobile redirect causing traffic drop? Can I move analytics code to capture them as visitors before redirecting them?
Yesterday I implemented a mobile redirect as I don't have a mobile version of my site. As a result I've seen a drop in traffic which makes sense as my redirect script is at the top of the page. If I were to move the redirect script below the analytics code would that allow me to still track mobile users? Would this affect my bounce rate though?
Reporting & Analytics | | SamCUK0 -
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 -
Hi, my website suddenly fell to the sixth page. All of the keywords. Is this sandbox?
www.enakliyat.com.tr this is my website when, i write the google "enakliyat" i found my website in te sixth page. Two days ago my website was on the first in google. Do not understand what it is.
Reporting & Analytics | | iskq0 -
Sudden drop in direct visit?
I'm having a sudden drop in direct visit on 12th January by 50% and never go up again since then. I dont change anything in my website, just regular posting. Could someone give me any idea about this? Thank you
Reporting & Analytics | | apps-foundry0 -
I am new to SEO. Would appreciate anyone share with me how can i further optimize my website to attract more visitors based on this scenario?
Hi all, Thanks and really appreciate for your time helping me out here, and i am very new to SEO. Just a brief introduction, our team have been developing a gaming review website (specifically targeting MMO game, facebook game, and browser-based game) since September 2011, and the website show significant improvement for the 1st month, and we got daily UV spiking up to 2k in November. The issue here is that the visitors start to become very stagnant, and even dropping now. Even though we try hard to publish more game reviews and there is NO IMPROVEMENT AT ALL for past 2 months in terms of number of visitors, and we have no idea how should we further proceed to attract more visitors...We have about 7 k site pages (however not all are with content). For the past 2 months it seems like there is nothing going on that proportionate to the effort we put in. Pretty discouraging, so we decided to sign up SEOMOZ to get SEO help from the community here. Some general questions we have: 1. Is it because of the the quality of the content we write ? (not enough keyword density, review too short, etc). 2. Is it because of the website designed not user friendly and not optimized? 3. Is it because of the general gaming trend, or other competitors? 4. Are we penalized by google by any chance? Are we spamming or anything wrong that deter our improvement? 5. Our main revenue source is on advertising, and currently we are using adsense. Would the ads placement affect anything? 6. Based on your knowledge and expertise, any advice would you give us? Would appreciate if you can take a kind look at the website to understand the scenario better: www.gameonline2.com, with 3 subdomain of: wiki.gameonline2; gameplay.gameonline2; cheats.gameonline2. For your reference, example our competitors are: www.onrpg.com; www.bbgsite.com; www.mmohut.com I would be happy to share with you any further information including google analytics if needed. I have report generated from SEOMOZ but i would appreciate the pros to help me take a look to give me a more complete ideas of how can i further improve to gain at least 10k visitors per day. Thanks again for your kind help and time. Andrew
Reporting & Analytics | | andrewsoh070 -
Goal Conversion Rate increase AND Abandonment Increase
I wonder if someone can help me understand some data I'm seeing in Google Analytics. SetUp Goal with 3 step Funnel Date Comparison is 1st-8th September & 1st-8th June The Data (pics attached) Looking at the Goal Conversion Rate I can see: September - 11.58% vs June - 10.42% an increase which Google shows as (+11.18%) For same time period Abandonment Rate is showing September - 71.3% vs June - 61.5% - an increase which Google shows as (+16.5%) The Questions How can I bee seeing both an increase in conversion rate AND and increase in Abandonment rate on the funnel? And why doesnt "(Conversion Rate + Abandonment Rate) = 100%" ? Many thanks for any help! yqwFP.png cj5dn.png
Reporting & Analytics | | TobiasM0