20% Dip in Traffic. What could be happening?

[Andrew_IT]

Hello Dear Community

Yesterday I had a sudden drop in visits - screenshot attached. It shows how yesterday Friday 17/10 has had a dip in visits vs Friday 10/10 (1 week ago).

I have an authority blog in Italy with over 90k monthly visits. I do now black-hat SEO stuff, and my content is rich. Organic traffic grew 85% y-o-y and I was actually on a nice, slow growth trend, but now, 20% dip.

The things I did before all this happened, and which could have had an impact (but I'm not sure about) are:

1. Configured Max CDN and W3 Total Cache (before I was just using SiteGround's Super Cacher plugin and that's it). So now my site is faster by a lot although I'm having issues like I mention in point 2.
2. I had to clear the cache at least a hundred times as I was configuring Optin Monster for lead generation
3. I changed my Google Analytics code from the old version to the new version (universal)

Besides this I check my best keywords in RankTracker and it looks like nothing happened to my rankings. Yet a few of my most popular posts which gets roughly the same amount of visits everyday for the past few months, had a dip of 30% more or less.

I also added a screenshot of my Webmaster tool dashboard. Everything is ok and there are no messages. Also yesterday was not a national holiday in my country (Italy) so everything should have been normal.

Please share with me your thoughts about this. What else should I check to get an idea? What do you think it could be?

Thank you!

Andrea

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[DirkC]

Don't forget that for Universal Analytics the code needs to be in the head section - not in the footer (this wouldn't explain the drop in traffic however)

Did you check the pages with the Analytics plugin - to see if the tag is always fired?

There is  a similar thread on Google Productforums - but the answer isn't very clear either: https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/webmasters/mrD1aOjHLC8

Without the actual url it's (and access to the stats) it's difficult to guess what could be happening.

Dirk

[Andrew_IT]

Hi Dirk, yes I'm sure the code is present on all pages. I installed in the footer.php and I'm using WordPress.

Could it be connected to Max CDN? Everytime I do some edit to the site I have to purge the cache and I'm wondering if this could lead to conflicts with GA.

Check out todays hour by hour stats versus same day last week. They are very odd:

http://imgur.com/zpocx8D

Thank you for sharing your ideas

Andrea

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[DirkC]

The links to the images do not seem to work.

If you modified the Analytics code - my first idea would be to check if the tags are present on all the pages - you can do this quite easily using a customer filter in Screaming Frog.  Set the Analytics on "hour" view - during the period of transition - and see if there is a sudden drop of traffic at a specific point in time - if this is the case - it's almost certain that the drop is related to a problem with the Analytics tag.

Check Analytics reports- check if the drop is equal in all sections or if the drop is significant in some sections - which could give you an indication of where to look. If you're site has a structured url - the easiest way to check this would be in the Audience report > Site Content > Content Drilldown.

Check the pages with issues with the Chrome Plugin for Analytics - check if Analytics is collecting data on these pages - you could also consider using the Analytics Debugger plugin

Dirk