Direct Traffic Spike
-
In February, I transferred an HTML site to a WordPress Platform. Since then, Direct traffic has spiked to nearly 400% since the WordPress transition. The Direct traffic spike took roughly 2 months before it started to kick in. Does anyone know what this could be attributed to?
-
The re-directs may have been the issue...will report back when I can see a trend. Thanks for the help!
-
Hi Steve
Direct traffic which 404's should not trigger any sort of hit. They could be coming from a variety of places: old links, bookmarks, browser history, emails, social shares etc. Your best bet if you want to retain any traffic value there is to 301 them to relevant pages if possible.
-Dan
-
That may have helped. We changed some of the page names to more relevant and descriptive pagenames. Alot of our landing pages are 404 when I look at the Direct Traffic now. Would that trigger a Direct Traffic hit somehow? Those should still be referrals from old links...right? Even then, the 404 direct hits don't make up for the difference. Direct traffic for the homepage is up significantly too.
-
In addition to some of the other suggestions, I would suggest segmenting your traffic even more. Is there any other common denominator? Mobile vs Desktop? Certain landing pages? Location? etc...
Also, it's not a typical looking glitch, which shoots straight up and stays there, the direct traffic takes some dips etc - what's happening there? Can you segment anything about the direct traffic during those dips etc?
-Dan
-
Is this consistent with scrapers and feed grabbers? I launched the site in mid february. The direct traffic didn't really kick in until a month or two after. The previous site was a straight .HTML site that I built. The new one is a WordPress site.
http://www.screencast.com/t/ETME6FbDhvz
I would like to think that the traffic is good. But if it is effecting the security or organic traffic in any way, I need to fix it. My organic traffic started to sink after the WordPress switch as well.
http://www.screencast.com/t/dJ0Oeyma5Xs
Any thoughts are appreciated.
-
Egol,
In my experience, scrapers and feedgrabbers are usually server-side scripts that won't register in Google Analytics because they won't have Javascript enabled.
Of course - the server logs will definitely show scrapers.
-
EGOL has a good point about the scrapers.
One thing I would like to mention about Wordpress is to pay attention to your spikes. Below is a link to my personal sites stats.
http://screencast.com/t/eJ6pFjg2BkFj
Now, I am going to show you the daily for july.
http://screencast.com/t/neiHXyj6ck
Now, here is the break down where you can see the most requested page.
http://screencast.com/t/pMT1tKpJOpO
Look how the numbers are skewed. I only change content on this site like 2 times a month. But the second most requested page is the admin page. I have noticed here lately that there are some new bots running and they are nailing the admin pages of WP.
With WP being the most used platform on the internet, it is like Windows when it comes to people looking for exploits to it. I would suggest using a Wordpress security plugin. I cannot really recommend any, I haven't used one myself. What I tend to do is just disable the login by renaming the file with an extension of .php_ then it will 404 all requests. This can be a viable option if you manage the sites totally and do not have clients that want to login to them, like in my case. If not I would look for a WP security plugin recommendation.
-
Scrapers and feedgrabbers.
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 to exclude traffic for a specific mobile device in Google Analytics view?
Hi, Need help on how to exclude traffic for a specific mobile device in Google Analytics view. I have been searching and the only information available is excluding IP address of internal traffic. Is there any way to exclude traffic through a mobile MAC address?
Reporting & Analytics | | Khadija_K0 -
Alternative tools for Keyword Traffic
Hi There, Wondering if anyone has any other tools they would recommend using for finding out keyword traffic on websites. Currently (and I'm sure like most), my website is connected to Google Analytics and Google Search Console. My biggest frustration becomes the "(not set)" variable that appears when I go to review the keywords section. It's always such a large number and I have no way of finding out what people might be typing in and coming across my website. Of course, I understand the privacy factor as to why Google must do this but it's certainly difficult to analyze what's working and what's not. Any tips, tricks or suggestions are greatly appreciated! Thanks, Lindsay
Reporting & Analytics | | MainstreamMktg0 -
We have a client that wants to apply UTM URL tagging to track local organic traffic in Google Analytics. Is there any benefit in doing this?
One of our clients requested that we apply UTM URL tagging to better track organic traffic in Google Analytics. We found this to be an odd request because we are most familiar with UTM tracking for special campaigns (referral tracking, PPC, email tracking, etc). Is there any benefit of applying UTM tags to urls to analyze local organic traffic in Google Analytics? Are there any resources out there about this? Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | RosemaryB0 -
20% Dip in Traffic. What could be happening?
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: 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. I had to clear the cache at least a hundred times as I was configuring Optin Monster for lead generation 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 2vII81q yXn6zBD
Reporting & Analytics | | Andrew_IT0 -
Organic Traffic Drop and Rank Increase After Video Thumbnail added
So my company has created a large amount of videos and I took a couple of them and created a test video sitemap to see what effect adding a video thumbnail/rich snippet to the SERPs would be. It worked on one page and gained 2 spots (position 6 to 4) for the highest keyword, but traffic didn't increase too much. Then a week later I tested it with the page that we get the most organic traffic for, which is ranking for a very big keyword. It worked and gained a bit of ranking, but traffic decreased 50% ever since according to Google Analytics. It seems to me that the traffic from users clicking on the video thumbnail is not be tracked as google / organic even though it lands them on the intended page/doesn't redirect anywhere else. I've looked to see if traffic to this page increased overall to see if it was being tracked via a referral or as something else, but couldn't find any traffic discrepancy. The only thing I did find is that impressions under SEO > Landing Pages > Video Property increased, but this could be from the page ranking in the Video SERPs now. Has anyone experienced a similar situation? Do you think having a video snippet could be that big of a turn off for customers that people just aren't clicking like they used to? I don't think so, that's why I'm leaning towards a tracking discrepancy in Google Analytics.
Reporting & Analytics | | OfficeFurn0 -
Huge Traffic Drop?
I am seeing a huge 30-40% traffic drop which started around 8-9 PM EST last night. I am compare the stats of today with last Saturday and the drop is significant. I am checking it in Google Analytics and Clicky and both report the same. The Adsense impressions drop also show the same. The rankings of my top keywords seem to be fine. I re-checked them using ranktracker for Google US, UK and others. I don't understand what has happened here. Anyone else seeing the drop? Is there a Google Panda update underway?
Reporting & Analytics | | abhim120 -
How to see traffic for specific keywords in GA
Hell guys, What i want to achieve is to generate a list of specific keywords showing traffic for a certain periode of time. I also want so be able to compare this time period with historical data. I want a list as shown in: Traffic sources -> sources -> search -> organic. This shows a list of keywords generating traffic out of the organic search results. When you use a filter you can only use one word so it seems. I just want to create that list but with the specific keywords i choose to display. I tried advanced reports and advanced segments but that doesn't really give me what i want. The idea behind this whole thing is that i want to give my client an overview of the traffic received on the words we are optimizing for. this traffic has to be compared to the previous month so they can see clearly if there were changes. Thx !
Reporting & Analytics | | 5MMedia0 -
Will having a subdomain cause referral traffic from the domain name?
Hi! One of our clients has a site with the store on a subdomain: store.example.com. When we've set up goals for order confirmation pages, we often see most of the sources attributed to example.com. Is this because of the subdomain issue? How would we correct it so that we would see as the referring source for the goal the site that sent to the root domain originally, and not the site that sent to the subdomain? Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | debi_zyx0