Has anyone noticed a dramatic drop in direct visits year over year in GA across multiple sites?
-
I monitor about 10 websites in GA. Many of these sites are in a stable phase of their lifecycle. I've noticed this year that direct visits on all my sites and even friends sites have dropped by 20-60%. Has anyone seen any explanation for this or noticed this when compared to previous year? In every instance I have no penalties, notices, anything and the drop is made up completely of "direct visits".
-
Did you guys ever make any sense out of this?
-
Did you ever come up with any explanation for this?
-
Yes I am seeing it too. Very strange. Overall my traffic on my 3 biggest sites is up, but direct visitis is down by about 30%.
-
@jp have you come up with any possible thoughts on what it could be? I am really surprised that there aren't more people talking about this. I'm at Mozcon right now. I would like to see if someone here could answer it.
-
We are experiencing a similar phenomenon.
-
I didn't ask for methods. I'm looking for an explanation of why a small sample of sites has seen huge drops in direct visits. Has anyone seen this issue?
-
This does not answer my question at all. I'm not a web novice.
I don't have your resume or a list of your websites.
So, I gave you solid data and shared a method of increasing your direct visits.
Sorry you didn't like it.
-
This does not answer my question at all. I'm not a web novice. I've been using analytics tools for years. I know for a fact there is something going on with the reporting and someone must have seen this. Here are the industries I have seen this on.
design blog
design downloads
custom t-shirts
If you look at the current month or any month this year vs the same timeframe last year you see drops anywhere from 30-60% in directs. It is not affecting my sales. It is causing goal conversions to climb arbitrarily. These sites are not all related. I have even checked against other friends with established websites and seen the same thing. If you have a site that is in a growth mode you won't notice it. I have a site that is up 250% in organic that doesn't appear the same way. Older properties with more stable traffic and less growth are showing it.
-
Has anyone seen any explanation for this or noticed this when compared to previous year?
I am only watching a few sites and we are working every day on those sites. Direct visits are climbing climbing on those sites. If you are continuously adding new content to these sites that engages the visitor your direct visits should be going up.
We are adding new content to these sites every week. And showing that content prominently on the homepage and across the site with server side includes. We also have programs that rotate the content on the homepage so visitors who visit multiple times in a week see different content on each visit. This freshness makes people come back to see what is new and that type of visit is usually a direct visit or a domain query, which I believe are enormously valuable for increasing your rankings.
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
-
How do sites without access to a site's analytical data, determine a site's organic traffic?
I've recently used a organic traffic checker that showed you your traffic compared to each google algo update. I was interested in how they derived the organic traffic totals for each month, without having access to our site's google analytics? I've since compared the data to historical google analytics data and it's not wrong, isn't 100% match either but isn't far from fact. So if they're predicting or making a guess, it's rather spot on, site crawlers and SERPs snapshots only provide so much info, I'm just wondering where they get the rest from and how?
Reporting & Analytics | | Deacyde0 -
Www and non www versions of the site: 301 redirects but I still get impressions on the wrong version
hallo, I moved from www.bastabollette.it to bastabollette.it, setting a 301 redirect. If I check google search console, I still get impressions and looks like all old www pages are stille indexed. (see attached) why? how can I fix this? thank you
Reporting & Analytics | | micvitale0 -
How is this site being tracked in GA?
Hi, Bit of an unusual one this, so please bear with me. This site http://www.hayesandhurst.com/ is being tracked in Google Analytics but we're unsure as to how. To the best of our knowledge we haven't inserted the tracking ID into the theme options or the tracking code into the source - and yet it appears to be tracking successfully! I did send some instructions to the client to set up the Analytics account in their name - I fear they have added the code somewhere to the site, but we cannot see where! Perhaps via Google tag Manager?? As I say, an odd one this, but if anyone can shed any light on this mystery i'd be hugely grateful. The tracking ID is UA-64505394-1 for the record. Regards,
Reporting & Analytics | | nathangdavidson
Nathan0 -
Why am i seeing google.inc in analytics as direct traffic? Bug?
Recently i have seen two clients sites see a spike in direct traffic coming from google.inc. Is this a bot/bug which i should filter out. Just a bit confused why google.inc has visited our clients site 676 times! Any insight would be great.
Reporting & Analytics | | BlueWren1 -
Complete loss of Organic visits within Google Analytics??
Hey guys, I have a pressing query that's really puzzled me! I've just been going through Google Analytics and noticed that there has been a complete drop off of all my organic visitors from May 7. All other traffic mediums are unaffected so there is no issue with the Analytics code recording visits. I haven't received any penalty and my rankings have actually improved in the last month. This is proper bizarre. Any ideas? MjLmL70.png
Reporting & Analytics | | Webrevolve0 -
Weird Math in GA Ecommerce Tracking
Hi everybody. I've recently discovered that I have a problem with the ecommerce tracking on a client's website. The client sells concert tickets at an average price of $10 per ticket. The custom ecommerce platform they use is kind of unusual; the same product often has different SKUs, but not always. This isn't associated with different seats, etc. In fact, I don't yet know why they've set it up that way. The problem that I'm facing is this: the data in Analytics is calculating the "average price" of a SKU item as the total price. If, for example, the actual average price for a SKU item is $10 and four of those SKU items were sold, Analytics will tell me the average price is $40. This means that the total revenue for that SKU shows up as $40 x 4 = $160. Needless to say, this is enormously skewing the data. Here's a screenshot. Note, it's the same product: http://screencast.com/t/JyLQkb3jzz6s The total revenue for ticket sales is way off because of this, and I'm not sure if it's a problem with the ecommerce tracking code in Analytics, or something that the ecomm platform is doing. Have any of you experienced anything like this, and if so is it a fix in Analytics? Thank you!
Reporting & Analytics | | newwhy0 -
Why is my Domain Authority dropping from 52 to 46 but my Keyword ranking has never been higher?
At the start of August my Domain Authority was 52 but it has fallen to 46 over the course of 8 weeks. At first this was credited to the smaller index that SEOMOZ has taken and when this was certainly in line with our rivals results as well who all suffered a drop. When the index issue was fixed we did see an improvement, back up to 51 at the start of September, pretty much in line with all of our rivals. However our Domain Authority has dropped again and this time it is in complete isolation, none of our rivals have suffered anything like a 3 point drop. Our SEO has never been better with 65% of our keywords ranking in the top 3 and 86% ranking in the top 10. Im wondering what is causing this rapid drop in Domain Authority and what affect, if any, it was have on our future keyword rankings. Thanks, Emmet
Reporting & Analytics | | CertificationEU0 -
Redirects to external sites
Hi there, I have listings that all link to external sites. In order to track how many times each link was clicked I coded a redirect script that simply redirects to the respective url. www.mysite.com/go/123/ - redirects to another site www.mysite.com/go/541/ - redirects to a different site Is there anything I should or should not do from seo stand point such as blocking the /go directory in robots or adding a no-follow tag to links? I'd appreciate your advice. Thanks
Reporting & Analytics | | vmotuz0