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Google Analytics problem

by Matt Hoey
4 replies
One of my sites has a huge problem right now, Google Analytics is consistently showing 98% of visitors as Direct Traffic when this is simply not true.

The website runs on Joomla.

Has anyone experienced this before? None of my other sites show this problem.
#analytics #google #problem
  • Profile picture of the author Mollysbrother
    How do you know it's not true?
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    • Profile picture of the author Matt Hoey
      The sire ranks well, it had 297 visitors yesterday, 6 of them came from search engines, even though i rank high for terms with millions of competitions and thousands of searches.

      The direct traffic increases with my SERPs too.
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  • Profile picture of the author PSM
    That usually happens when a redirect is involved I think, I had a similar problem before when using a split test script and the half of visitors it redirected to salesletter B were coming up as direct traffic which was annoying.

    The only thing I can think of from the top of my head if you can't think of a redirect that might be involved, is canonicalization of the url - does Joomla automatically redirect from your non www. url to your www. one? That might produce that effect, particularly if you are ranked somehow with and without the www.

    I am just guessing here, but setup your Google webmaster account to only use one version of your url and see if that helps.

    If you have already done that then I give up But I definitely had this problem with a redirect.
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  • Profile picture of the author Matt Hoey
    The site uses Joomla's SEO URLS. It rewrites and shortens the URLS. I've changed my webmaster tools to display the site as www. at all times but when i logged in today there was still no change. 329 visitors, 325 direct traffic.

    I don't know what to do, i can't go on tracking direct traffic all the time, i need GA!
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