Is Our Traffic Drop Due to External Events?

[guggi2000]

Our website traffic has dropped since Monday evening.

Between midnight and early morning drop is around 3%.
Daytime and evening by 10% - 20%.
Highest drop noticed in the US, some in Latam.

The drop was noticed with traffic from Search Engine but also in direct traffic.

This can have many factors, including external events (i.e Boston Marathon bombing, live coverage of Thatcher's funeral in the UK...).

So before freaking out and blaming Google (again) we are checking global traffic at [internettrafficreport.com...]

Does anyone know other (better) resources to check global/national internet traffic volumes?

[guggi2000]

PS: The tool needs to be by niche. The tool/link mentioned above showed an overall drop on Monday and Tuesday but I assume that media sites and twitter gained traffic.

[tedster]

Internet Traffic Report has been a standard tool for many, many years. It's the only "close to real time" reporting that I know of. There are other sources for reports (such as Akamai) but they are often quarterly. Other traffic monitoring focuses on various specific backbones and spurs = jot exactly what you're asking for.

If I were you I would wait a few days before giving this traffic drop any big energy. The news cycle over the past three days has been extremely and unusually intense - Boston Marathon, Ricin in DC, the Background Check Vote, West TX explosion, arrest in the DA murders in TX and more.

[guggi2000]

Thanks Tedster! Intuitively every webmaster is immediately looking for his own errors and some immediately blame Google.

However, if you see a drop only during daytime and Direct Traffic is down as well, it may be something else.

Anyone else noticed a drop?

[HuskyPup]

Anyone else noticed a drop?

Yep, I posted earlier today that since the weekend I have some sites that have doubled their traffic and other sites that have had their traffic halved.

Apart from all the stuff that is happening I get the feeling there's a Panda/something shakedown/up going on again.

[guggi2000]

can you post a link to your other thread?