Organic traffic drop with universal analytics

Reported organic traffic drops when universal analytics is implemented

[robdwoods]

For one of my clients' sites organic traffic, including branded organic traffic seems to have dropped abruptly when the site relaunched. My sense is that there must be an issue with the way universal is tracking organic traffic compared to before they had universal. There's no other explanation for why organic traffic including the keywords "brand" and "brand.com" (not the real URL) would drop exactly when the site relaunched.

With a second site I am looking at I'm seeing exactly the same behavior. In fact, all they did was relaunch on a new domain without changing the site at all. They changed from something like examplewidgets.com to example.com. On exactly the day of launch their branded traffic dropped abruptly despite the fact they still ranked number 1 for their brand and all variations of it. It seems to be a strange coincidence that in two site relaunches, one a redesign on the same domain and one a new domain with the same design, that branded organic traffic would drop literally the day of launch before Google had even had time to rebuild the indices for those branded keywords.

It seems to me that these can't be "genuine" declines in organic traffic if they started happening within hours of the relaunch, before Google even had a chance to update anything in the search engine results pages.

There is a similar question that has been asked in the Google product forums by someone else with no response. Has anyone encountered something similar?

[travelin cat]

The first simple question I can think of is are you absolutely certain that the tracking code is on every page and in the same location it was previously?

[robdwoods]

It is. I have found out a little bit more about the problem since. It appears that with some Universal analytics installations, especially where there's a great deal of branded organic traffic, that universal takes it upon itself to count many of your branded queries as direct traffic even though they're coming from a Google search. Basically what used to be reported as organic traffic now gets reported as direct. That doesn't account for all of the change that I'm seeing but it seems to be at least a contributing factor.

[robdwoods]

Actually the above isn't entirely accurate in one case the tag is not in the exact same location it was previously its actually been wrapped into a piece of External JavaScript code which houses multiple marketing tracking tags

[ergophobe]

Basically what used to be reported as organic traffic now gets reported as direct. That doesn't account for all of the change that I'm seeing but it seems to be at least a contributing factor.

Very interesting. It makes sense with respect to URLs, but not with just branded terms.

[robdwoods]

@ergophobe I'm seeing a decline on a lot of terms but it's the only explanation I can come up with for why branded organic traffic would start dropping hours after relaunch. In the case of one of the clients it's almost a direct correlation of organic traffic being down 10,000 visits a day and direct visits being up 10,000 visits a day immediately after the launch

[ergophobe]

That actually might explain something I'm seeing. There are so many factors in my case that it's tough, but I'm I'm going to find out when they updated to universal analytics and see if the significant drop in branded terms is related.

[LuckyLiz]

We recently switched from old Google code to the universal code on one site. What we're seeing is that google referral seem to be counted now as traffic coming from google.com.

One other thing we've seen today and last weekend is what looks like a drop in traffic, until we look at things like location and referrals vs direct. Direct traffic from Amazon locations is down significantly. But all other traffic is not down.

[ergophobe]

I found out from someone who knows the history of site that in our case it was a previous misattribution of paid search showing as organic.