You arrive at the office one Monday morning, expecting it to be like any other day. You grab your coffee, chat with your coworkers, and finally make it to your desk to do your daily morning activities.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s when you notice\u2026 Your traffic dropped off. *screams in the distance* A LOT of your traffic dropped off.<\/p>\n
How could this happen to you? You\u2019ve heard about it happening to other people but you never thought it would happen to you.<\/p>\n
First off, don\u2019t panic. This fictional scenario (yes, it was fictional) is actually more common than I made it seem. Websites are fickle mistresses and they can break for a million different reasons. If you do happen to have an inexplicable drop in traffic, follow these steps to discover the source and you\u2019ll have your site traffic back up in no time.<\/p>\n
The best place to start is at the source\u2026 literally. The source of the traffic will tell you exactly where to begin while digging into analytics. Each source has vastly different characteristics and these characteristics are the starting point. You\u2019re going to need to go through some very different paths if your paid traffic went down compared to your organic traffic.<\/p>\n
Start by making sure that your segment is set to \u201cAll Sessions\u201d as this will make sure that all of the traffic your site received is accounted for. Then click on Acquisition on the left side and Overview. Once you\u2019re there, scroll down and you\u2019ll see a breakdown of all of the channels that brought traffic to your site.<\/p>\n
Now we need something to compare against.<\/p>\n
Of course you don\u2019t want to wait a long time after a traffic-catastrophe but the longer it\u2019s been, the more data you will have to work with and the easier it will be to discover what\u2019s wrong. Set the date to the beginning of the traffic drop all the way through the last full day. Check off \u201ccompare to\u201d and choose \u201cprevious period\u201d from the drop down.<\/p>\n
At this point you should have a graph that shows the performance of each source compared to a time period from before your fateful day.<\/p>\n
You should also be able to tell which ones fell and which ones didn\u2019t. You can\u2019t proceed without knowing which channels were affected.<\/p>\n
Is there just one channel that was significantly impacted? You can breathe, this is actually a good sign. When one channel is significantly impacted, it is a lot easier to find out why.<\/p>\n
If all of your channels dropped, we are basically back at go and we didn\u2019t collect $200. We do know that it\u2019s not a specific channel so it doesn\u2019t mean we haven\u2019t gone anywhere yet.<\/p>\n
Once you\u2019ve discovered which channel is affected, read the relevant section below. Each section will tell\u00a0you what you should be looking for and guide you through the symptoms to the ultimate problem that caused a drop in traffic.<\/p>\n
If all of your mediums dropped it\u2019s likely a technical issue. Each channel has such varied reasons that they would drop but if it\u2019s all of them it\u2019s most likely a technical issue that is preventing everyone, no matter which channel they come from, from entering the site.<\/p>\n
Once you know that all of the mediums dropped, there are a few things you can check that might lead you to the answer.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
Google Trends:<\/strong> Sometimes, it really is this simple. There are fewer people interested in your product now than there were before. This generally shows through a gradual decline but seasonality or an event in the industry could cause this. Organic traffic dropping is the toughest to diagnose. You have no control over the source of traffic and sometimes the symptoms for the drop in traffic are hidden deep in the analytics data. Don\u2019t worry though, it\u2019s there! You\u2019re just going to have to work for it.<\/p>\n Here are a few things you can look at for a drop in organic traffic but if you need a deeper dive, read this article<\/a> for some additional steps.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Landing Pages:<\/strong> Which pages were affected. Be sure to check landing pages because it\u2019s the loss of people entering the site that we are worried about. Is there a pattern? Was one section of the site affected while the rest remained unaffected? Direct Traffic would be a very odd one to see. Particularly because direct traffic rarely consists of only direct traffic<\/a>. Most of the time, if you see a drop in only direct traffic, you\u2019re probably actually dealing with an attribution error (or an attribution solution if a problem was fixed).<\/p>\n Some things that you could look into that would explain a drop in direct traffic are:<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Tagging Issues:<\/strong> Some links or sources of traffic don\u2019t automatically pass a referrer. This is the most common in email marketing but can happen elsewhere. It\u2019s possible your direct traffic dropped because someone decided to start tagging the right way. Paid Traffic will be fairly easy to identify since you\u2019re only getting the traffic that you are paying for but there are still places you can look to see what may have caused such significant changes. In many cases, a mistaken setting in your adwords account will be preventing you from succeeding such as negative keywords blocking targeting or changes in bids.<\/p>\n
\nAffected Pages:<\/strong> See which pages were affected. If all the pages were affected you likely have a technical issue preventing people from accessing your site. If only a section was affected, there might be a widget or code tweak that caused the page to break.
\nAnnotations:<\/strong> Check your annotations. You\u2019re taking annotations right? (I\u2019ll harp on this frequently). If you\u2019re taking careful annotations for changes on the site, you should have some inkling as to what may have caused this issue.
\nGoogle Webmaster Tools:<\/strong> Google webmaster tools has a lag in its data of about 2-3 days. If you haven\u2019t figured it out by then, go check out webmaster tools (once there\u2019s data, of course) and see if there are any errors or indexing activity.<\/p>\n
\nOrganic –<\/h2>\n
\nSecondary Dimensions:<\/strong> Secondary Dimensions are where the trends tend to show up for drops in organic traffic. Unfortunately, picking the right one can be a guessing game sometimes. I prefer source and device category, but others may have revealing data as well.<\/p>\n
\nDirect Traffic –<\/h2>\n
\nOffline Marketing:<\/strong> If your company markets offline and integrates digital into their offline (these companies are extremely rare) then you may experience a jump in direct traffic. People would be far more likely to manually type in the URL.
\nGhost Traffic:<\/strong> With the proliferation of spam traffic going around<\/a>, it\u2019s possible that you may have had a lot of false traffic. Once the appropriate analytics filters are in place, it may appear that there was a significant drop in direct traffic when really, you\u2019re simply filtering out visits that weren\u2019t people.<\/p>\n
\nPaid Traffic –<\/h2>\n