wingslevel - 2:24 pm on Mar 22, 2012 (gmt 0)

US ecom sites. Still seeing the same big shifts in quality of google organic referrals. The testing seems to be ongoing - this has been the case since the beginning of this year and right through the various updates and data refreshes. Maybe this live testing - if thats what we want to call it - will be with us permanently.

We were also affected negatively on march 10th, but there hasn't been much analysis here about that one. For us, overall google organic referrals down 5-10% with the aforementioned swings in quality. Was it just ecom sites?

The changes that we are seeing as of yesterday are looking like another update. We saw a slight improvement in the number of organic google referrals, but, also more pronounced swings in the quality of google referrals (measured by conversion rate). In fact, for a couple of hours last night, we saw some of the highest conversion rates in the history (14 years) of our site from organic google referrals. Pure nectar. This was followed by some very poor converting traffic which lasted for 6 hours. I should note that our poor performing google referrals (zombies) are not international.

I would ask that those of us who have been experiencing these swings should undertake some careful log analysis and report back to this thread. For my purposes, GA is too dumbed down for this. In fact, i used to be able to get hourly conversion rate data by referrer from GA, but they seem to have removed that function (strangely, not long after i mentioned it in a post here - oops). Now I have to parse this out of my native log files.