Sudden drop in visits

50% drop in visit numbers in Dec and Jan - anyone experienced the same?

[Hannu]

One of our clients has experienced a 50% drop in the visits numbers (user sessions) in December and January.

Throughout 2001 there have been aprox. 100.000 visits every month, but in Dec and Jan2002 there have been only 50.000 visits.

They have made no changes on the website nor any changes on the webserver.

Anyone experienced the same or have a plausible explanation?

[Mark_A]

> They have made no changes on the website nor any changes on the webserver.

Hannu such an unspecific issue does not help, they must be able to be more specific:

Visitors classified by which source?
Visitors from which inward links?
Unique visitors or pages viewed?

[skibum]

One of our homebuilder clients saw a significant drop in overall visits during December. Unique visits then more than doubled in January. That turned out to be the most unique visitors ever in one month. No significant changes to the site or marketing campaign to cause such a change either way.

[chiyo]

Our sites for business professionals attract much less hits on all holidays, and this compounds duing traditional holiday times where just about ALL the world is on holidays or gearing up or down for them - ie: December/January.

Our sites for educational types (boffin sites we call them) are just recovering in the last 2 weeks. They will go down mid year for two weeks. And then go up again until late November when they gradually decline to very small traffic again. Wow I would love to be an academic!

That has been the pattern for 5 years now.

I see around here that consumer sites have their best traffic in Dec/Jan I think. Gifts, holiday booking, more free time to try new gadgets etc etc... It all depends on your readership and yes seasonal factors should affect your traffic a lot.

[Eric_Jarvis]

we get a huge drop every Christmas...it picks up again mid January

we also had a huge drop on our German pages last year...turns out that one SE was penalising us for headers and titles in capitals...it picked up again when I changed it

there are two factors...what you do to the site and what SEs do to the algorithm...your rannking can change dramatically without you changing a thing...and often for quite subtle reasons

[Hannu]

I'm quite sure the drop is not caused by holidays.

Here are some more numbers to compare with:

Pageviews:
dec-00: 1,971,669
jan-01: 1,967,556
nov-01: 2,582,751
dec-01: 211,434
jan-02: 274,294

Visitor sessions:
dec-00: 106,121
jan-01: 97,213
nov-01: 106,140
dec-01: 57,999
jan-02: 66,625

Unique visitors:
dec-00: 39,944
jan-01: 33,979
nov-01: 45,110
dec-01: 36,127
jan-02: 40,908

There are no dramatic changes in traffic from external sources. However, I've noticed a big drop in the top referring urls from the site itself.

[DrCool]

I haven't seen a drop in traffic for most of the sites that I really look at and care about and actually saw an increase in some of them. The sites are mainly travel and ecommerce related sites. I did see a big drop in sales in the month of February. Did any one else have comparable traffic in Jan and Feb but see a disproportional drop in sales?

[Mark_A]

Hannu your situation is more interesting now we can see some stats.

Simple derivatives of your stats show that:

Page Views per session
----------------------
dec-00:- 19- 100%
jan-01:- 20- 109%
nov-01:- 24- 131%
dec-01:- 4- 20%
jan-02:- 4- 22%

Significant reduction in page views per session, is the site content not as relevant or exciting as it was two years ago?

Does the navigation or display somehow fail in the browsers and screens that people are now using (2 years after successes), version 5 and 6 browsers and 1024x768 screens theer are vew few users on 640x480 now?

Page Views per Unique Visitor
-----------------------------
dec-00:- 49- 100%
jan-01:- 58- 117%
nov-01:- 57- 116%
dec-01:- 6- 12%
jan-02:- 7- 14%

On Average each Unique visitor looks at far far fewer pages than they did. Again similar but does this indicate change in the environment, better offers available elsewhere?

Visitor Sessions per Unique Visitor
-----------------------------------
dec-00:- 3- 100%
jan-01:- 3- 108%
nov-01:- 2- 89%
dec-01:- 2- 60%
jan-02:- 2- 61%

A significant feature is that your identified unique visitors visit 40% less often than they did 2 years ago.

An immediate suggestion I have is ask your visitors what they think about the site?

Especially identify anyone who has been visiting over the time period and ask them how they view the contents now compared to then..

Ideas only hard to tell more without knowing more about the site, contents, objectives etc.

Hope this helps.

[rcjordan]

>Did any one else have comparable traffic in Jan and Feb but see a disproportional drop in sales?

Yep. Traffic and forms (travel info requests) submitted were steady or UP, bookings through my affiliate sub-pages DOWN.

[Hannu]

Mark_A, great inputs. Thanks!

[NFFC]

Month of Apr, 2001 535643 12.21%
Month of May, 2001 501731 11.44%
Month of Jun, 2001 576891 13.15%
Month of Jul, 2001 633915 14.45%
Month of Aug, 2001 519642 11.84%
Month of Sep, 2001 421232 9.60%
Month of Oct, 2001 332424 7.58%
Month of Nov, 2001 238874 5.44%
Month of Dec, 2001 198033 4.51%
Month of Jan, 2002 271016 6.18%
Month of Feb, 2002 158189 3.61%

>They have made no changes on the website nor any changes on the webserver.

Same with this guy. Guess which month the bandwidth got throttled.

[Mark_A]

NFFC > Same with this guy. Guess which month the bandwidth got throttled.

That must be one of the nightmares of internet site managers .. just when it might be that you start to get a result something strangles it.

I added "unlimited data transfer" to a selection checklist meaning that a hosting solution had to charge for "over agreed bandwidth" rather than cut off or throttle as soon as I noticed what could happen I got a cold chill.

Here's hoping I never forget it on an important site!!

[Brett_Tabke]

I would really start back tracking where the traffic is coming from. If there is that big of a drop in traffic numbers and nothing on site has been changed, then it has to be external factors. If it were the site, then it would be a slow decline. When it is something that drastic, then it has to be from external factors.

[Edge]

I had a slow down starting about December 15 and lasted through mid - late January. I have a content site that recieves heavy student traffic. This is what I attribute the slowdown too. Additionally, I noticed heavy traffic pick up around early December which is about finals time...