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
-
Do I miss traffic (thus, page value) by using the GWMT Parameter Handling Tool?
I'm working through duplicate content issues. The tracking code or the session id in the URL is being recognized as a different page than the original. Example: www.example.com is dup content to www.example.com?_nk=x&ad=y&_ga=z, which is tied to a marketing campaign If my setup in the URL parameter tool is set to: Effect = None Crawl = Representative URL, then do I: 1. Miss all the traffic being driven to the ?_nk page?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | johnnybgunn
2. With a Rep URL, there still would be two indexed listings: the .com & the .com?_nk...right? Neither is good. Redirects of all the URLs is not an option b/c there are hundreds of these that would need to be redirected. And I also don't want to slow down page load time with excessive redirects, which has been the case when adding 100+ redirects for the recent website migration we did.0 -
My Domain authority dropped 9 points... Does anyone have any suggestions to fix this significant drop.
My domain authority dropped by 9 points and I haven't done anything differently since the last scan. What is going on?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | infotrust20 -
Organic search traffic improved (besides Google) for last 6 months
Hi, to follow up on my previous post (http://moz.com/community/q/low-on-google-ranking-despite-error-free), I was wandering if someone can tell me whether we are penalised by Google or not? Since the last 6 months, we see a rise in organic visitors coming from Bing, yahoo but Google remains the same. Despite the advice given in previous post, I just feel that something else must be wrong. Perhaps more inbound links with high PR? Socially, we are pretty much engaging 50-60% of our audience, yet no link flow will count for our organic ranking sadly enough... Hopefully someone can have a look at our site www.mercadonline.es in more detail? Ask me in a PM for more info! Thank you Ivordg
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ivordg0 -
Enormous 7 page drop after switching servers and adding load balancers. Thoughts?
Hello Everyone, I'm a longtime Moz user but I had to switch accounts after switching jobs. I was hoping someone might be able to give me some insight on whats going on if possible. Our startup had first page position for our most valuable keyword: "Crowdfunding real estate" for about 6 or 7 months. Once we launched and switched to a production server behind load balancers, we dropped almost overnight to 7th page and we've been there for about a month. We don't have many links yet and some of the ones we DO have are kind of spammy (no idea where they came from and in process of trying to get them removed) but we thought it'd be strange to see that massive drop. We are even pages below a competitor who has NO links and basically zero content on the page. We don't have any notifications in WMT about a manual penalty or anything. I'd really, really appreciate any advice and If anyone has any ideas, the page is at: PatchofLand.com Thanks, Jason
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PatchofLand0 -
Our website www.turbocupones.com dropped drastically in ranking today
Our website www.turbocupones.com dropped drastically in ranking today. I have no idea why this happened as we have not outsourced any SEO and sticked to google´s guidelines. Can you please check the web and give me Ideas why this happened? Our traffic dropped by 1000%. All our content is unique. I have years of experience in SEO and never had a problem like this. The rankings dropped drastically for everything. As said all SEO done is white hat. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sebastiankoch0 -
Can a home page penalty cause a drop in rankings for all pages?
All my main keywords have dropped out of the SERPS. Could it be that the home page (the strongest) page has been devalued and therefore 'link juice' that used to spread throughout the site is no longer doing so. Would this cause all other pages to drop? I just can't understand how all my pages have lost rankings. The site is still indexed so there's no problem there.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SamCUK0 -
Ranking drop for a particular page on a particular keyword
Take a look at centerforhealthysex.com/sex-addiction. For months we were ranking in the top 3 spots with this URL for "sex addiction los angeles", even reaching #1 for a while. Late last year we redesigned and developed the site to clean up the code and redirects. We also cleaned up the internal linking structure. For years we had been ranking on "sex addiction los angeles" for the home page ... bumping around the top 5 spots, but we wanted organic traffic to go to /sex-addiction. In the Fall, we saw overall site traffic rise steadily. We made few changes to the site and none to this page or links flowing back to the page once we had achieved strong ranking -- we didn't want to mess with a good thing. Then November 27th we started losing ranking on this term and a couple others. The good news is that we gained ranking on some high volume traffic terms so overall organic traffic is reasonably strong, BUT we're not ranking on the terms where we want to rank. Centerforhealthysex.com/sex-addiction is now nowhere to be found on the target search term despite fairly strong page rank. I tried redoing and resubmitting the site map, cleaning out some potentially duplicative content but to no avail. I see no issues, errors or warnings in Webmaster Tools. We have a few medium priority fixer-uppers in SEO Moz, but we've taken care of the majority of the big stuff. What am I not seeing? Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | joshuakrafchin0 -
Why our site dropped in rank for a main keyword
Hello, Our site nlpca(dot)com dropped in rank for a few terms, including the main term "NLP". Could you look at our site and tell us what might be the cause? Thank you so much, Bob
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobGW0