Mobile redirect causing traffic drop? Can I move analytics code to capture them as visitors before redirecting them?
-
Yesterday I implemented a mobile redirect as I don't have a mobile version of my site. As a result I've seen a drop in traffic which makes sense as my redirect script is at the top of the page. If I were to move the redirect script below the analytics code would that allow me to still track mobile users? Would this affect my bounce rate though?
-
Yes, the "drop" in traffic (or drop in reported traffic) is because the analytics code doesn't have time to kick in before the redirect script takes over.
If you were to move the refresh script to the bottom of the code and the analytics to the top, the likelihood of reversing this goes up. We had a similar problem with a client site in that they had a very heavy piece of conversion optimisation software running at the top of the code and our tracking code at the bottom. Users clicking from search to the home page usually knew where they wanted to go quite quickly, and would click away before our tracking code had loaded. Client was desperate to know why our SEO traffic had gone through the floor. It had not. We had them reverse the analytics and CRO codes and our traffic "came back".
JS is executed in the order it's included in the code, so moving it should work. Should being the key word - I am not 100% on this.
I am not sure how to place a delay with JS so hopefully someone else can chime in on that one. Meta refreshes allow a short time delay - does anyone know what the correct way to do this for solely mobile traffic would be? Acknowledging that meta refreshes are not recommended for SEO, but they are a popular way of defining a short delay in redirecting a user.
-
The mobile site is not operated by me unfortunately.
-
Why you not add the analytics code to the mobile site too? The actual market of mobile phones runs JS without problems.
-
Uh, hard to say as you need to do it in the script you're including ;-). Can you send me the URL of the JS (or via PM, whatever you prefer)?
-
Thanks for your reply. How would I add a delay to this code?
-
Hi Sam,
If you're doing the redirect with a JavaScript solution then the answer would be yes. Put you would need a delay of 1-2 seconds to make sure the GA tracking code is initialized.
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
-
Spammy traffic
Hi guys! There has been an unusual amount of traffic to one particular page on our blog. Now that the business is slow, I had the time to look into it. Half of that traffic is coming from India and we are a Chicago based limo service. We 'll skip why that happens part for now.
Reporting & Analytics | | echo1
I let Hotjar record 100 session and upon reviewing them I have noticed a lot of sessions with no interaction, no mouse movement, no clicks; just scroll and exit. My question is related to implementing a type of verification (captcha) for that blog page to see if the bots / behavior changes.
Are there any downside in terms of in page SEO for this type of implementation?
What is good practice for something like this?0 -
Google Analytics Numbers Are Weird
Hi, I'm having a strange problem from past one month. My website gets about 10k pageviews a month with an average bounce rate of 50%. Lately, I observed a strange thing. The avg time on page of visitors from selected countries is less than 1 second and the bounce rate is zero!! How is this possible? This is happening from past one month and it would be really helpful if you guys could tell me what exactly is happening?? Ive attached a screenshot for better understanding. website url : https://www.specbee.com/ fIAXXgF 3zQuBAN
Reporting & Analytics | | ganesh10 -
Slow growth in organic traffic
Hi, Recently our website after 5 months of launch started seeing more organic traffic, thanks to the seo effort being put. However, off late the growth is quite slow and we don't see much increase in organic traffic any more. Any idea on what could have happened to cause this or is it normal. Here is the link to the website to check and if you can recommend anything - https://www.keyhub.com Thanks, Search-Console-Search-Analytics-https-www-keyhub-com-1.png
Reporting & Analytics | | kh-priyam1 -
Moving wordpress themes, any best practices on setting up Google Analytics for the change?
We currently have a mess of filters and views in our Google Analytics instance. We have a chance to make a clean start. Wondering if creating a whole new property is a good idea? Or just some additional views? Any other pointers would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | jill.myers0 -
Self-Reffering Traffic After upgrading to Universal Analytics
Backstory: We have always had an issue with self-referring traffic but in waiting for the UA upgrade we put it on the backburner for getting fixed. We have now upgraded to UA and I was under the impression that GA would automatically exclude the domain associated with a property as a referral source. However this is not what I am seeing under my referral traffic source. With 10 websites having issues with this I need some help. Should I use the referral exclusion list? Also on a handful of our sites we have region specific URLs, I am also seeing these come in as self-referring traffic. I should also mention that about 85% of our sales are being attributed to the self-referring traffic. Here are two sites for example sake: ZootSports.com and K2snowboarding.com
Reporting & Analytics | | K2_Sports0 -
Huge Traffic Drop after 301, Keyword and Schema.org Fixes
Hello there, I'm first gonna explain what I did to my website: I was using a 302 redirect to send from http to https, fixed it to a 301. My url has a keyword and I was using many pages with keywords as well. ex) www.keywordhaha.com/keyword-the-best , www.keywordhaha.com/keyword-easiest-on-keyword-market Changed it to : www.keywordhaha.com/app , www.keywordhaha.com/games, etc... I was not using any crawler tools, so I added Schema.org, Json-LD and rdfa-node, which are all working properly. Synced my page with our Google+ page, which was recognised by Google Added a proper logo and fb:admins, and was recognised by facebook. After I did all this optimisations, I experienced an immediate traffic drop (10%) and my impressions/clicks according to the webmaster tools dropped 75%, in a 2 day period. Any ideas where there could have been a mistake? mPdhFdG.png
Reporting & Analytics | | jancpc0 -
Domain redirect for direct mail (source) tracking in Analytics?
We have a client that would like to do some direct mail marketing and the plan is to use a short/simple domain in the marketing materials, which redirects to the main site domain. By default this would show as a referral traffic source in Analytics, right? So any traffic that came through that redirect would be attributed to "shortdomain.com / referral"? Meaning I wouldn't need to do any sort of customized, advanced tracking set up to track conversions that I've already set up (ecomm and goals) and attribute them to this new source? Just double checking that I'm not overlooking something. Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | VTDesignWorks0 -
Looking for a Google Analytics expert
Looking to hire a Google Analytics expert for a project. Dealing with trying to track traffic across multiple domains and then work with the Ecommerce options. Contact Jeff Logan @ Avelient with costs and time frame for work. [personal information removed by editors. please contact via private message system to exchange information]
Reporting & Analytics | | Avelient0