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.
-
If you see a sudden change in Analytics it's very often related to a problem with the tracking code. You could install the Analytics plugin for Chrome & check your pages. It could be the same visit is tracked twice - as Bill says - check the bouncerate. If this has significantly decreased it's almost certain a tracking issue.
You could check that you don't have a meta refresh or something similar which could artificially boost your page views.
Hope this helps
Dirk
-
hmm... It could be someone manually grabbing your content.... or a robot such as qualys that is visible to your analytics.
I've had both.
-
One thought is to Check your GA code, sometimes we see sites (mostly Wordpress) accidentally install the old code and new code on the same page and get wacky metrics like that. If that is the case you should see an extremely low bounce rate.
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
-
Page Performance
Not long ago, I had a couple of peers asking why I was using sessions to evaluate page performance. They said it wasn't a good metric for evaluating a single page because it only looked at how many site visitors began their journey through you site form that page. They were trying to convert me over to pageviews, which they said was a superior metric because it show you every time that page had been loaded and therefore provided better insight. Moz uses sessions on their landing page report. Is this because it's an SEO tool, so all they are concerned with is how individual URLs attract site traffic? Signed, Confused in California
Reporting & Analytics | | PGD20110 -
I've seen 4webmasters.org/default.apsx as a referrer, but now it's showing as top page visited
I've seen 4webmasters.org/default.apsx as a referrer, but now it's showing as top page visited. How is this happening and how do I fix it?
Reporting & Analytics | | Stamats0 -
Structured Data dropped suddenly
Just noticed a large drop in Webmaster tools of our structured data graphs. Both "items" and "items with errors" dropped. It is across the board on all our sites. Even checked some of the sites that I do consulting work for, and they dropped. My assumption is that this is another Google glitch, similar to what we saw last year, and in March of this year, where is corrected itself. Anyone else seeing anything on their end?
Reporting & Analytics | | tdawson090 -
404 errors more than 1.8 lacs, Duplicate Content, Duplicate title, missing meta description increasing as site is based on regular ticket selling (CRM), kindly help
Sites error increasing i.e. 404 errors more than 1.8 lacs, Duplicate Content, Duplicate title, missing meta description increasing day by day as site is based on regular ticket selling (CRM), We have checked with webmasters for 404's, but it is not easy to delete 1.8 lac entries. How to resolve this issue for future. kindly help and suggest the solution.
Reporting & Analytics | | 1akal0 -
Why are plus signs (+) suddenly showing up in Google Analytics organic search keywords reports?
Since June 13, 2013, the number of organic search queries containing a plus sign (+) has gone up over 1,000% compared to the previous period on my site in Google Analytics. These plus signs appear to be taking the place of spaces in these search queries (i.e. "word1+word2+word3"). This appears to be almost (or completely) Google organic traffic, not other search engines. Since I highly doubt searcher behavior would change so suddenly, I'm trying to figure out why Google is replacing spaces with plus signs. Is anyone else seeing this? Any ideas?
Reporting & Analytics | | RCF0 -
Homepage on page 2 for site:domain
Hi all, today I noticed that our homepage is located on page 2 if you do the site:domain query. As far as I know, the site:domain results mirror the importance in the eyes of Google. Some time ago, our homepage was the first result. I have to say that we do not often have changing elements or new content on the homepage, it is more like a static page. But still the most linked to page on the domain... What conclusion can I come to? Is our homepage of lower importance to Google than some time ago? Is it a problem for SEO? As we backed down our advertisments, the traffic from branded keywords fell the last months - could this be an explanation? And, most important: do I have to worry? (Besides, the SEO-traffic is fine and growing..)
Reporting & Analytics | | accessKellyOCG0 -
Why Does This Page Rank Badly?
Hi, The page in question is: http://www.toymart.com/details.php?id=1764 The problem is that this and most of the other 10,000 pages used to rank well but now are really struggling.
Reporting & Analytics | | ToyMart3
I am begining to suspect that I have some sort of Google penalty but I cannot know for sure.
I believe I comply with all Google guidelines and I think the SEO is good.
Possibly the eBay affiliate links are the problem but they form a large part of the content and user experience.
The page gives a price guide for items in different conditions and has various other tools for the user. Any thought would be appreciated. Thanks for your time in advance. Alan0 -
GA - how returning visitors are counted ?
If a visitor comes to my site from 3 different traffic sources within a session, does GA report shows 1 visit and 2 returning visitors ? Previously ( before Google made changes in session ) it used to show 1 visit and zero returning visitors. right ?
Reporting & Analytics | | seoug_20050