Analytics Experts - Strange Analytics issues

[JamesSJ]

Hey guys,

I wonder if there are any analytics experts out there who might know what's up with my site.

I recently moved my sites to a new server - everything has gone very smooth except my traffic has plummeted.

I was averaging 3000+ a day visits , now i'm getting around 1400 (the 3000 average was for a couple of years, the 1400 has been for about 2 weeks now).

On face value it looks like something has happened to my traffic sources - here's the thing... nothing has changed. Still ranking on Google where i was before, i have a fairly large (30k +) Fb community i'm regularly pumping out content too and an equally large email list.

Other things to note - my sales have not dropped which actually means my ecom conversions have risen, bounce rate has dropped, avg time on site has risen... in fact everything points to there being some issue with visits tracking being wrong somehow as all the other stats are showing that everything is fine.

Something else to note - i used to have loads of links on my sites built with Google's link builder (which adds on a bit of tracking code to the link so can track ecommerce funnels etc) - when i moved my sites across i removed all the google tracking so now all links are just regular links.

I can only assume that the tracked links were counting towards page visits - for example if someone came to the site and then clicked on a tracking link then they are counted as two visits.

That is the only way i can think why the traffic would show such a huge drop without sales or any other important metrics dipping. If i had dropped a page or two on Google i'd be able to see that - but as far as i can see everything has stayed the same!

Does anyone know if campaign links (generated with Google's link builder) are actually registering as visits - when looking at traffic sources search, direct and referral are mentioned alongside campaign so it looks like they are but i'm unsure.

Has anyone any suggestions? If you need any further info let me know and i'll gladly answer

 

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[JamesSJ]

I can confirm that using the tracking links will inflate visits

https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/2731565?hl=en

So in short

- if someone comes to my site and clicks on regular links = 1 visit
- if someone comes to my site and clicks on tracking links = multiple visits

 

[valuegiver]

First of all, make sure that when you are checking your rank, you are logged out of Google profile since Google does personalization of search result for every user. Next, if you have high bounce rate, please get rid of Google Analytics, since that will send signals to Google that your site doesn't give good user experience. I strongly recommend you get rid of Google Analytics entirely since I don't trust Google at all. Install some free analytics like Piwik. Good luck.

 

[JoeV]

Next, if you have high bounce rate, please get rid of Google Analytics, since that will send signals to Google that your site doesn't give good user experience. I strongly recommend you get rid of Google Analytics entirely since I don't trust Google at all. Install some free analytics like Piwik. Good luck.

Using Google will improve your rankings IF you have a good site. If you have a bad site and poor quality SEO, you better hide the site.

Google uses all of its tools to help rank sites. The merchant center, webmaster tools, analytics, adwords, etc.work together to help your site.

Google is not some spy company looking to screw you. They want businesses to do well. Their business was driven by adwords. Their quality search results is what attracted such a large base of return visitors. They just want people to find good quality relevant sites. But, if you are lazy and want to game the system, good luck. You ARE Google's enemy.

 

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