Traffic Shift Trend by the Hour

Need help diagnosing why there is a sudden shift in traffic

[rwilson]

I have an ecommerce site that last year in April saw a dramatic decrease in traffic for the 6am - 11am hours. This traffic is partially made up later in the day as there is an increase for the 7pm - 10pm hours. Most of the site traffic is from US but there is international traffic too. This trend has continued since April. There were no major site changes that I know of in April.

Things I know:
This decrease is across all channels, most notably in Organic and Paid.
Mobile has become a lot stronger during the later hours.
At first glance, it doesn't appear to be any particular states.
6am - 11am used to be a great time for conversions

What should I be looking for? What would cause a dramatic shift in what time people arrive to the site?

[RhinoFish]

Check your position by hour, perhaps you have a dayparting competitor.

[engine]

Mobile has made significant difference to some of the stats i've monitored. It's now much easier for people to surf and to review a link immediately, and not when they get back to their desktop.

Sharing, too, makes a difference. Again, it's become much more instant.

Speculation: Could it now be the change to mobile that's affected user habits for your sector?

[rwilson]

Thank you, I'll look into both suggestions! Engine, I definitely think mobile is impacting time of day people are on, especially in the later hours. It is becoming more and more of a factor.

Rhino, I think that is a very likely possibility, especially with how dramatically the trend occurred! I had overlooked that because I saw it across both paid and organic. I didn't think that an effective ad campaign could have affected our organic. We do have a new competitor who has emerged fairly recently.

[rwilson]

I looked into ad position by the hour, they remain consistent throughout the day. I also looked at ad clicks, they remain consistent also. Next up, I'll look at mobile.