June 15th Flat Line Traffic

[samwest]

As of June 15th, our traffic has flat lined. Nearly identical daily totals, only sales are early morning and late evening (like 15 minutes before midnight). Same pattern every day this week. Check your Google analytics to see if you too are experiencing this odd glitch. Here is my traffic graph from GA.

[imgur.com...]

I suspect they are now clipping day time traffic to increase traffic to adsense partner sites. Of course they need to show another huge profit for the quarter.

[edited by: goodroi at 3:59 pm (utc) on Jun 20, 2014]
[edit reason] Fixed url [/edit]

[netmeg]

I don't see anything like that, so I suspect they're not.

[samwest]

@netmeg - other's in the June SERP topic have seen this, so I'd like to see if it extends beyond just a few webmasters. It looks rather unnatural.

[netmeg]

I don't argue with your stats (and I'm sorry about them) but I do take issue with your explanation as to why.

[EditorialGuy]

No flatlining here. Google "organic traffic" and overall traffic have edged up a bit here and there, but they're mostly following the same hourly and daily patterns as the equivalent days last week and the week before.

[Mentat]

As I told you, same problem here

[i.imgur.com...]

Info site, but material product related.
Big decrease on image galleries.

[netmeg]

Client ecommerce sites all pretty much the same. My own sites are killing it, but this is my season.

[Planet13]

I don't know if this is "flatlining" but I see about an 8% variation day-to-day from the 15th.

But my site is up about 42% traffic wise since Panda 4 and revenue from google is up 114% and ecommerce conversion is up 30% (my ecommerce conversion rate is always dreadful, so it only went from .14% up to .18%).

[aakk9999]

As I told you, same problem here

[i.imgur.com...]

Info site, but material product related.
Big decrease on image galleries.

What about doing the chart with Year-on-Year comparison for the same period of the last year? Can you provide (or describe) such chart?

I also have daily variations with Saturday being the worst day and the traffic is also seasonal so the only way I can realistically see what is happening is to compare it with the same period of the last year or the year before last.

[Rasputin]

We are seeing no such flat line here. It will be difficult to reach any conclusion without more analysis eg source country, google version, time of day, mobile or desktop, niche, info or ecommerce etc although I usually do as suggested above and compare with the same period last year and that very often helps explain variances.

I suspect they are now clipping day time traffic to increase traffic to adsense partner sites.

I don't doubt they will want to ensure profits increase this quarter, but this seems like a much less likely explanation than, for example, different rankings being tested this week in country X or school summer holidays starting in country Y etc.

[Itanium]

No flatline here either ...

[EditorialGuy]

I also have daily variations with Saturday being the worst day and the traffic is also seasonal so the only way I can realistically see what is happening is to compare it with the same period of the last year or the year before last.

The trouble with YOY comparisons is that many of us would be comparing apples and oranges. Even on a site with plenty of evergreen pages, things change, and the contents of this year's [widgets, widgetville, or widgetology] directory are likely to be at least somewhat different from last year's.

For gauging the effects of Google algorithm changes, I prefer to compare, say, yesterday over the same day last week or the week before. Our site's Google traffic tends to be fairly stable from week to week, except for very gradual seasonal increases or declines, so Google updates that affect us (such as Panda 4.0) stick out like the proverbial sore thumb when the occur.