urgent help needed - traffic and sale turned off like light

trying to figure out what causes so many zero seconds visits

[Mike McKnight]

Our traffic has gone down across all search engines
and super affiliate sites by half and sales have
dried up even after 3 weeks of 40 and 50 percent
off sales offers.

I have tried my best to determine if somehow
our traffic was being diverted by some devious
means during search engine results click, but
I can't see how that would be the cause. I use
both WebTrends and Mach 5 aval programs and according
to the Mach 5 software we have hundreds of click
thrus that are all very targeted search terms
from G and all the other big 3 engines which show
zero seconds and no hits recorded not one file
of any sort. Plus there are dozens more that
only show several seconds with a few hits on
files, html or gif/jpgs. All static pages.

I have a hard time understanding why someone would
go thru the trouble of doing a search on a 2 or 3
word term very targeted for our merchandise and
we have very valid product pages at the target
of these links, and then they don't wait a
second or 2 for something to appear. At first
I thought these were all just robot requests,
but why would a robot use a Google search
url?

We have been on the we since 1995 and have
steadily built up traffic, we have made it
thru all the big upheavils in the search
world, colllapse of Infoseek, AltaVista
lycos and others along the way, but have
never seen traffic and sales go this flat.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Mike

[kpaul]

i know you don't wanna hear it, but learn PPC.

the same thing happened to me.

i'm thinking if i eventually want to quit my 'day job' i need consistency. the only way to really get that is by advertising. best advertising at the moment? PPC...

[kpaul]

also, a better response maybe: can you try reaching your site on another machine?

have you made any major changes recently?

[Mike McKnight]

kpaul
Thank you for your reply, I had my brotherinlaw place
an order from California we are in Wisconsin every
thing went as it should.

I still own a few shares from the GOTO IPO
so yes I know all about PPC. etc. etc.

I quit my day job in '90 , now just too old to
get another day job. Thanks,
Mike

[cgrantski]

Meaningful traffic is down, but you're getting hundreds of clickthroughs from organic search engine listings and those clickthroughs are just hitting the HTML page and disappearing before any images get requested? Have I got this anywhere near right?

Do both your log analysis tools agree on this? Are they correctly measuring visits in the first place? Does your site use a cookie?

What do your logs say about server response time for those clickthrough requests? Or status codes?

Do the IPs associated with these hits appear to be legitimate ones, and diverse?

Are these zero second visits coming from SEs or affiliates or both?

Do they happen in clusters or are they dispersed throughout the day?

Has the number of failed hits increased a lot? Which kind of failed hits? How about 302 and 304 codes?

Are they associated with a particular browser or platform?

What do you mean by traffic being down? Does that include the hundreds of zero second visits?

Did this happen overnight?

Has anything happened with your hosting? Changes in firewalls, proxies?

[Mike McKnight]

I have for all these years avoided cookies, but I'm
throwing in the towel and going to figure out how
to do the cookie thing.

Which is more common, secession cookie or the
other type, for emcom sites.

I do not thing I'm seeing reliable data until
I start using cookies. Web Trends shows all zero
seconds, and I know that's not true. And I'm not sure
if Mach5 is showing true results with no cookie tracking set.