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Sudden drop in Google Analytics results--Reasons???

by Vikram Anand
9 replies
  • SEO
    • |
I am facing a strange problem these days. For my website, I have been using SEO to get organic traffic. Till March 27th the Google analytics trend was on the increasing side. But after March 27th, there was a sudden drop in the results. Now it has dropped even further.
My SEO analyst says that it is normal, not to worry. However, I suspect something is wrong.
My webmasters tools-both Google and Bing , does not show any signs of errors.
I don't even see that my website is banned by Google.

I don't know if it has any correlation; but last week when I configured Google adwords campaign for my wordpress website, there was an error that 'my site is suspended'

Is it because my website has an opt in page which is against the Google adwords policy?

Can there be an actually suspension of the site which would have affected by analytics results?

There are some of the questions for which I am looking for answers and the possible solution to get back my old Google analytics trend traffic results.
#analytics #drop #google #resultsreasons #sudden
  • Profile picture of the author TopHats
    Check the HTTPS version of your url.
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  • Profile picture of the author nettiapina
    It's almost impossible to say anything insightful about stats that you don't have in front of you. There's no universal explanations in this space.

    What kind of timescale are you looking at? Did you compare to previous year?

    Does the supposed drop happen to be on weekend, national holiday or is there some kind of "natural" explanation that you can find from a calendar?
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    • Profile picture of the author Vikram Anand
      Originally Posted by nettiapina View Post

      It's almost impossible to say anything insightful about stats that you don't have in front of you. There's no universal explanations in this space.

      What kind of timescale are you looking at? Did you compare to previous year?

      Does the supposed drop happen to be on weekend, national holiday or is there some kind of "natural" explanation that you can find from a calendar?
      The timescale is past two months. Till March 27th it was on the increasing trend. However after that it dropped drastically.
      Yes. When it started happening it was a weekend. However on Monday, Tuesday it was expected to improve. But it has gone down even further. There were no holidays on these days.
      That's why I am little worried and want to figure out the reasons.
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      • Profile picture of the author nettiapina
        Originally Posted by Vikram Anand View Post

        The timescale is past two months.
        Can you increase it? Would be best to compare to last year in my opinion.

        What kind of increase are we talking about here? Also, how many visitors you get in a day/month?

        If you've got only a handful of visitors you can't really talk about "trends". Even small variations will show drastic changes in the diagrams.
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        • Profile picture of the author Vikram Anand
          Originally Posted by nettiapina View Post

          Can you increase it? Would be best to compare to last year in my opinion.

          What kind of increase are we talking about here? Also, how many visitors you get in a day/month?

          If you've got only a handful of visitors you can't really talk about "trends". Even small variations will show drastic changes in the diagrams.
          The fact is I started with the SEO just two months back.
          I think you are right. There are not appreciable number of visitors to my site currently. But still because of the sudden drop I was worried. Because of the drop my daily visitors numbers have dropped to mere 7 nos.

          Do you suggest that I should wait for few more days?
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          • Profile picture of the author nettiapina
            Originally Posted by Vikram Anand View Post

            Do you suggest that I should wait for few more days?
            Not just wait. If the number of visitors was important to me I'd start promoting the site.

            But yes, that would be essentially my advice too. You're probably wasting energy on wrong things. It's possible that site changes have a negative effect, but you didn't describe any such changes. Even then the number of visitors seems so low that it's really hard to make any predictions.

            Do you already track SERP placements? If not, that's going to give you more accurate information on your search engine visibility with your chosen keywords.
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            Links in signature will not help your SEO. Not on this site, and not on any other forum.
            Who told me this? An ex Google web spam engineer.

            What's your excuse?
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            • Profile picture of the author dburk
              Hi Vikram,

              Dive deeper!

              The goal of marketing analytics isn't to simply understand what has happened, but to learn "why" it has happened. This understanding of "why" is what we call a marketing"insight". That should be what all your monitoring and measuring is focused on, learning why a metric has changed, or is different from another segment.

              Looking at aggregate data "averages" tells you almost nothing. You need to segment your data to see which segments have changed. For example, traffic from some keywords might have remained unchanged while other keywords have tanked. Traffic might have dropped from many keywords all at once, or at different times for different keywords. That tells you something useful. You can start looking at the specific terms that have changed the most and focus on one at a time to first understand what has happened and then to dive deeper to try to gain an understanding of "why" it changed.

              Search trends may have changed, some regions may have changed while others have not. Perhaps, the changes coincide with new content you posted? Perhaps your average page load speeds slowed just before search traffic dropped off? The bottom line is that there are a bunch of stories that your data can tell you if you just dive deeper to see what is happening at a micro level. Those micro stories will give you a better understanding of the macro story that currently has you puzzled.

              Dive deeper!
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              • Profile picture of the author Vikram Anand
                Originally Posted by dburk View Post

                Hi Vikram,

                Dive deeper!

                The goal of marketing analytics isn't to simply understand what has happened, but to learn "why" it has happened. This understanding of "why" is what we call a marketing"insight". That should be what all your monitoring and measuring is focused on, learning why a metric has changed, or is different from another segment.

                Looking at aggregate data "averages" tells you almost nothing. You need to segment your data to see which segments have changed. For example, traffic from some keywords might have remained unchanged while other keywords have tanked. Traffic might have dropped from many keywords all at once, or at different times for different keywords. That tells you something useful. You can start looking at the specific terms that have changed the most and focus on one at a time to first understand what has happened and then to dive deeper to try to gain an understanding of "why" it changed.

                Search trends may have changed, some regions may have changed while others have not. Perhaps, the changes coincide with new content you posted? Perhaps your average page load speeds slowed just before search traffic dropped off? The bottom line is that there are a bunch of stories that your data can tell you if you just dive deeper to see what is happening at a micro level. Those micro stories will give you a better understanding of the macro story that currently has you puzzled.

                Dive deeper!
                Thanks for this insightful explanation. You have indeed given an approach to think beyond what is obvious and diagnose the reasons for drop in traffic at a deeper level.
                I will work to adopt to this mindset.
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  • Profile picture of the author rmacklyn
    Even I saw the same kind of changes. But the time frame is different. Mine is like on 27th there was a good hype on the sessions. And from 28th the increase is tremendous.
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