how to locate cause of drop in traffic

[musicales]

Since about July last year a site that has been steady in its traffic for at least 5 years or more has started drifting inexorably downwards in terms of traffic, such that I am now 40% below last years figures in total. I am trying to use Google analytics to at least figure out where this is happening, as far as I can see it seems fairly uniform.

Does anyone have suggestions for the best way to try to extract this information?

[jakebohall]

Take a look at year over year data specifically looking at traffic sources. Is there one particular source (organic, paid, referral, direct) that seems to be dropping?

If you notice the drop is in referral traffic, you may have simply lost a link from a good referrer.

If you notice your drop is in direct traffic, maybe your brand has lost recognition in your space.

If you notice your drop is in paid search, did you decrease adspend? Is there more competition?

If you notice your drop is in organic, then try to identify the specific keywords causing the drop. Did you lose rankings for those terms? Is traffic what it used to be (look at Google Trends data)? If it looks like you are losing across a bunch of terms, try to identify any specific date that the traffic started dropping and then cross-reference that against a list of known algorithm updates to see if there is a correlation.

Good luck! Let us know what you find and we may be able to help you drill down a bit further.

[jimbeetle]

And if you find it's Google-related be sure to check dates against the Google update history page [webmasterworld.com] to help narrow the cause.

[monitorscout]

There is no short cut to locate the cause of drop in the traffic. If you face a sudden drop in traffic you have to analyze the issue that is causing the problem. And the best way to analyze the cause is by using Google webmaster tools, Google Analytic and cPanel.

You can take the following measure to find out the reason:
1.Use Google Analytic and webmaster tools to check any existing or potential threat.

2. Check your DNS Records and Nameservers.

3. Check your .htaccess if it ia performing correctly.

4. Check my sql