A switch from Search to Direct traffic from Feb 2012
-
I have read about the Google algorithm updates galore in 2012. I would therefore be inclined to suspect a sudden sharp drop in Search traffic this year to be caused by such updates. However, I am seeing what appears to be a direct switch from 'Search' to 'Direct' traffic as of about February 16th this year.
There are no specific brand-building exercises or general advertising campaigns happening around this time for the site in question. It seems very UN-explainable?
I wondered if there are any thoughts from the various lurking gurus? I have attached GA screenshot..
-
for sure, all the best
-
It looks as though the site lost most of its LongTail traffic... Feb 1st-15th showing 131 different keyterms and Feb 16th-28th showing just 35. At the same time the traffic from branded search terms reduced significantly across the many variations.
For the mentioned time periods, Direct Traffic was virtually double in the second period.
With the drop in search/longtail and the perfectly coinciding jump in direct traffic, as a whole the site traffic remained roughly on trend. Very strange! It has remained this way ever since.
Thanks for the advice - Keyword analysis suggests some work could be done to re-introduce what has been lost there. As for that coinciding Direct traffic jump... I need to dig into that some more to fathom it. Wish me luck.
-
Do some keyword analysis. Drill down in the analytics reports and review the keyword data to see any trends. Also take a look at where the traffic is coming from (Geo target). We had a similar situation where the direct traffic spiked for a client and it was because the development team was based in that location and they were accessing the site a lot. If that is the case you can filter that traffic using the IP's.
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
-
Strange - Search Console page indexing "../Detected" as 404
Anyone seen this lately? All of a sudden Google Search Console is insisting in Page indexing that there is a 404 for a page that has never existed on our client's site: https://........com.au/Detected We've noticed this across a number of sites, precisely in this way with a capitalised "/Detected" To me it looks like something spammy is being submitted to the SERPs (somehow) and Google is trying to index that and then getting a 404. Naturally MOZ isn't picking it up, cause the page simply never existed - it's just happening in Search Console 2afc7e35-71e4-4e25-80a3-690bf10776a7.png It comes and it goes in the 404 alerts in Console and is really annoying. I reckon it started happening late 2022.
Reporting & Analytics | | DanielDL0 -
Google Search Console - Click Count Inconsistency
In Google's search console I see a discrepancy between click counts. At top I see this here and then beneath I see these kinds of numbers for click counts here. So the top click count says 252 and the bottom section appears to only shows less than 40. Probably a simple explanation here that I'm just not seeing. Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | a_toohill0 -
Are these Search Console crawl errors a major concern to new client site?
We recently (4/1) went live with a new site for a client of ours. The client site was originally Point2 before they made the switch to a template site with Real Estate Webmasters. Now when I look into the Search Console I am getting the following Crawl Errors: 111 Server Errors (photos) 104 Soft 404s (blogs, archives, tags) 6,229 Not Found (listings) I have a few questions. The server errors I know not a lot about so I generally ignore. My main concerns are the 404s and not found. The 404s are mostly tags and blog archives which I wonder if I should leave alone or do 301s for each to /blog. For not found, these are all the previous listings from the IDX. My assumption is these will naturally fall away after some time, as the new ones have already indexed. But I wonder what I should be doing here and which will be affecting me. When we launched the new site there was a large spike in clicks ( 250% increase) which has now tapered off to an average of ~85 clicks versus ~160 at time of launch. Not sure if the Crawl Errors have any effect, I'm guessing not so much right now. I'd appreciate your insights Mozzers!
Reporting & Analytics | | localwork0 -
Can not divide in different properties a domain in Search Console (Webmaster Tools)
Dear Moz Community, I hope you can give me a hand with the following questions. Im in charge of SEO of an ecommerce site in LATAM. It´s service is available in several countries, therefore each country has it subdirectory Eg. /ar /pe /co /bo /cl /br,etc... (in the future we will move to differente ccTLDs). I have been recomended to split or create different Search Console or Webmaster Tools properties (one for each subdirectory) but when Im creating a new property with a subdirectory, lets say www.domain.com/ar, Webmaster tools starts creating a property for www.domain.com/ar/ (NOTICE THE LAST SLASH) and it returns since that page doesn´t exist, what do you recomend me to do? Best wishes, Pablo Lòpez C
Reporting & Analytics | | pablo_carrara0 -
Google Analytics shows most referrers as "Direct" -- What are some better tools?
Very often Google Analytics will show 50-90% of our referrers as (direct) which is not very helpful. Are there other tools out there that will provide a clearer breakdown of what other websites are sending us our traffic? Specifically, I want to be able to be able to tell who are the top traffic referrers to my top performing pages on my site for the last 30 days. (I want to be able to study this on a per-page basis.) Thanks in advance!
Reporting & Analytics | | Brand_Psychic0 -
Has anyone seen their GWT Search Queries data resolve?
My GWT data seems to be have resolved through 9/28, but still looking low for the week starting 9/29 through present.
Reporting & Analytics | | EmpireToday0 -
Getting traffic for another site
Hi Everyone, Our website url/brand is very close to another website url/brand. We are non-competing entities. It appears as though this other company has begun a marketing program which has resulted in our traffic skyrocketing. However, it seems to have also resulted in our Pages/Visit and Visit Duration to decrease and our Bounce Rate to increase. Can anyone suggest how to deal with this type of scenario? Thanks,
Reporting & Analytics | | AC_Pro
Robert0 -
Nofollow page is being reported as a landing page for organic search in Google Analytics
One of my client's websites includes a series of pages for an enrollment process. All of these pages are blocked by robots.txt. In Google Analytics these pages are showing data as landing pages for organic search traffic, and have been for quite some time. There was recently a surge of organic search traffic landing on one of these pages, coming from multiple search engines. The pages appear to be blocked and I'm not finding any of them in the search results for the keywords that are being reported in GA or by searching for the url. Does anyone have any insights into why this might be happening?
Reporting & Analytics | | rgibson1000