tedster - 9:52 pm on Dec 16, 2012 (gmt 0)

switching from mostly desktop traffic to mostly mobile and back again. switching from mostly desired target traffic, i.e. US, to mostly undesired, i.e. Asian, and back again. switching from highly purchasing traffic to highly informational traffic and back again. switching from 'money' query terms traffic to 'non-money' and back again. switching from traffic mostly landing on product sales pages to landing on info pages and back again.

A great summary of the phenomenon, iamlost. I'd say that's exactly what we're looking for, especially if the cycles are frequent and the total traffic seems to stay constant even though there are shifts in "type of traffic".

I do think that server log analysis might be a better tool than out-of-the-box analytics to do this type of work. JavaScript could work too, but you'd probably need to customize what data the script actually collects.