"ZOMBIE TRAFFIC" Separating fact from fiction & emotion

[FishingDad]

This recent discussion about "ZOMBIE TRAFFIC" is just utter nonsense. What are people saying, anything worth while or just a communal <snip> because sales are down on the norm? The talk is firmly in the tin foil hat area.

Are you talking about SERPs, if so why, if your positions are dropping then that's that. If positions not dropping are you seriously saying Google is sending you people they know will not buy from you !? REALLY?!

Are you talking about PAY PER CLICK? if so then your talking possible click fraud then, aren’t you?

Giving any constant period on the internet, people buy or they don't buy and there's many many factors why they will one day and might not the next day.

[edited by: goodroi at 5:55 pm (utc) on Nov 10, 2015]
[edit reason] Let's be careful to keep the discussion on a professional level [/edit]

[samwest]

In the past, (prior to 2010) they must have ALL been in category 3 because people bought on the hour or better. Now it's 1 or 2 per day if lucky....with a few full throttle days per month...this month only two. Also, I have basically no ads in my vertical because I have only 1 direct competitor and he's doing worse than me. The stuff that ranks is all thin informational but on big brand sites like Pinterest, Houzz, HGTV and some other unheard of magazine sites. Total domain crowding by Pinterest. 4 to 5 on page 1. All people trying to corner my vertical with pictures.

Those full throttle days are clearly when some key listings move from page 2 back to page 1, which I used to absolutely dominate. Before all the cloak and dagger with referrals and hiding search keywords, I would typically rank 15,000 key phrases per month. Now it's under 1,000 and possibly as low as 200. Might was well shut down the site at that point. Meanwhile they seem to expect me to go out and secure a small business loan to buy more ads. Ain't gonna happen.

Funny, I live in the Midwest USA while masterjoe lives down under. I have this same "zombie / sync effect" with other users in the US and UK. This is clearly a system wide issue, but a common denominator between affected sites has yet to be found. Google will be happy to hear that.

[masterjoe]

Ive had pretty decent rankings consistently and have been getting keywords ranked as high as possible... doesnt make much of a difference any way you put it... zombie days are zombie days. The difference between on and off days are night and day. Barry said that hes asked them about it and they haven't bothered responding, maybe because they know their traffic sucks or because they're working on it or whatever, its too late to care now. All this "AI bidding" and other adwords features/new tech are useless if the traffic only converts 1 or 2 days out of the week. The problem was gone for a fleeting moment but has returned worse than ever. What a joke Poogle has become.

[hasek747]

@Samwest:

Also, I have basically no ads in my vertical because I have only 1 direct competitor and he's doing worse than me. (.....) Total domain crowding by Pinterest. 4 to 5 on page 1. (....)

Two questions if I may:

1) If you are losing, and your sole competitor is doing worse than you - where did the sales go?
2) Pinterest is not an e-commerce website, so if any buyers are reaching it, they are not buying anything there. Again - where are the sales going, in your opinion?

[ecommerceprofit]

cue music

Happy zombie day! How will your be celebrating with your family this year? It was one year ago today (Sept 2015) when we all started to meet. Anyway, have a great zombie day and here's to many more celebrations to come!

[Simon_H]

@samwest You've mentioned several times that customers are buying at almost exactly the same time of day, week on week, like clockwork. But that doesn't support the zombie theory. Do you study your conversion paths? Because customers very rarely hit a site and buy straight away. I know your site and I would suggest that customers could easily take hours, days or even weeks between finding the site and making the purchase. You need to be reporting on the time that converting customers first hit your site, not the time when they make the purchase.

[masterjoe]

Celebrating by officially shutting down my adwords account and going all in for Facebook and Instagram... not all my sites are suitable for these 2 but I have seen the light, social platforms are definitely a high leverage investment if you know what you're doing and have decent writing skills. It has been yet another zombie day, with a sale about 8 hours ago. Strange how Monday was over 15x more profitable, that just sh1tcanned Poogle in my eyes because there was just no more doubt about its deliberate manipulation.

[glakes]

Paging all zombie victims.... Just curious how everyone is doing since the 9/1/16 update. Please let us know.

When I noticed the update going through, I quickly activated Adwords campaigns to test. Friday was mediocre, Saturday was very quiet and Sunday things picked up. Yesterday my share of organic traffic from Google was down 20% from its norm. Today traffic returned to its normal quantity. Labor Day is historically slow for us, and I'm sure many other businesses. The conversion rate for Google organic was just over 1.5%. The conversion rate for Adwords was just over 7%. Providing conversions stay reasonable, my Adwords campaigns will not get shut off. The low organic conversion rate I largely attribute to the Adwords campaigns taking away sales. All in all, a successful and busy Labor Day for us (no zombies, great page views, good time on site, etc.). How is everyone else doing?

[masterjoe]

Conversions have almost dropped off completely for a few weeks now, things are very poor... Ive now got competitors bidding on my brand name and all ny competitive keywords and paying top dollar as a last ditch resort since their negative SEO campaign backfired. I may be forced back into adwords provided things look positive for you glakes.

[glakes]

Sorry to hear the 9/1 update did not help you masterjoe. If the competition is beating up Adwords really bad, it will be hard to make a living there too. I'll report back here with any info - just need to make sure this was not just one of the rare days Google decided to keep zombies away from my site only to have them return for days or weeks on end.

It's important to note that my ranks have not changed from the update thus far from what I see. I'm seeing a difference in traffic quality. CPA today is just under $1.63 per order, which is well within my range of being acceptable.

[masterjoe]

Thanks glakes, I will also be waiting to hear from samwest who I seem to have to have almost identical patterns in converting traffic on our websites. I have set up a test campaign, because I am quite literally being forced to thanks to Google making the ads appear as organic results and have competitors taking advantage of my brand names to swipe traffic... anyway, if they want to play dirty, then I am obliged.

[glakes]

What started out looking like a good update that would rid my sites of zombies slowly fizzled out. It was not the on/off pattern most of us experience but a gradual drop in traffic quality from Google. It seems Google is back to promoting Amazon in earnest as my Amazon sales have picked up while my Google traffic quality declined. No big deal, Adwords campaigns will be shut off. Daily traffic from Google is still elevated, though the traffic has turned into the same garbage I've seen from them for about a year.

I firmly believe that Google is either (a) manipulating the search results to prop up the Amazon/Google oligopoly or (b) their Rank Brain machine learning system is just so poorly written that it simply sucks <snip>.

[edited by: goodroi at 8:19 pm (utc) on Sep 10, 2016]
[edit reason] Language [/edit]

[goodroi]

@glakes Google is not trying to prop up Amazon. Google hates Amazon. Amazon is one of the few players that can compete against Google. Research shows that more buyers start their online search on Amazon instead of going to Google. This is a huge problem for Google. Fewer buyers means fewer Adwords profit and Adwords profit is over 90% of Google total profit. So I doubt Google would ever prop up Amazon.

[jambam]

I see amazon has had a huge boost recently... 4 listings in a row, chinease sellers dont need to spam anymore just create an amazon listing can even add a duplicate description and gets lots of internal link to the listing and there you have it.

[Simon_H]

Adding to @goodroi's comment, you also can't base anything on comparing your own sales through Amazon vs your own site. You're simply cannibalising your own sales. Amazon will *always* have a better domain QS than you and a team who actually know how to optimise a paid campaign. So they'll be able to sell your items through paid channels far cheaper than you can and will indeed grab your direct customers. That is completely expected and I'd be more surprised if Amazon didn't do this. This isn't evidence of zombie traffic or anything un-toward.

[glakes]

@goodroi

To some degree everyone is a competitor of Google. However, Amazon's CEO was an early investor in Google and Google has employed many ex-Amazon executives to their board of directors. Anyway, if Google hated Amazon so much they would not be giving Amazon 2, 3+ listings on the first page of the search results for many product queries. All the Amazon domain crowding is a whole lotta Google love, not the "hate" you speak of. Many large employers have workplace diversity programs, and Google's search results look like they need their own diversity program as well.

@Simon

If Amazon "always" has a higher quality score as you said, then why on 9/1 did sales spike in Adwords and gradually decline to crap? It seems your always is not always so. Oh, and by the way I posted shopping campaign data of which Amazon is not bidding on and therefore makes your prior statement completely irrelevant because the shopping ads appear well before Amazon's organic domain crowding.

All of this is kinda moot anyway. As long as Google is willing to take money and not give sales, the money gets cut off. And if Google likes driving all buyers to Amazon, since they have a great QS, that's fine because my prices are inflated there for a reason.

[ecommerceprofit]

glakes - I enjoy reading your contributions to this forum as well as the others. One point about inflating Amazon prices. Amazon will most likely eventually make you raise the prices on your own site or lower prices on their site. They forced us to do this a few years back when we sold on their site. We were given a short time to do this with a warning...lots of work.

I guess Bezos invested 250K in Google in 1998 - seems like he has some important ties with Google. I just don't understand why Google is in essence handing their e-commerce business to Amazon. Sure, they deserve great rankings but not the amount they have...if I were Google, I would find a way to penalize Amazon with some obscure problem...haha

[Simon_H]

@glakes Amazon's domain QS will barely change from day to day and won't plummet on any individual day. What does often change on the 1st of the month are bids. So on 9/1, various bids change, sales patterns jump as a result and then bids get readjusted over the next few days to return back to normal.

What is also possible - and what I see a lot - is the precise opposite of what you're saying. Every time Amazon gets a ranking boost on certain terms (e.g. they increase bids on certain ads), customers find your products on Amazon. They then do a price comparison using organic, hit your site with a navigational search and buy from you as you're cheaper. So, in fact, Amazon is generating your direct sales, not stealing them. Do you do proper attribution modelling? I doubt it. These situations can get very messy because you end up cannibalising your own sales from Amazon in some cases and vice-versa in others.

The fact that you're turning your campaigns on and off every time things change tells me that you don't really understand Adwords. Doing Adwords properly is seriously complex. Most of those who profess to be experts really aren't. You need to try to understand a lot more about this before blaming everything on Google and Amazon. Google does indeed mis-match results in paid search causing additional costs, but what you're seeing appears unrelated to this.

Of course, if selling via Amazon works for you, that's great.

[masterjoe]

Simon, do you still get a fair bit of "zombie traffic"? I have racked my brain over this trying to figure out where the buyers are going and I still just don't get it. I've analyzed several profitable keywords and tried to figure out what happens when the pattern is on/off but there seems to be little to no difference in SERP's, but huge discrepancies in sales.

[Simon_H]

@masterjoe Yes! I still believe the cause is a combination of Google mis-matching paid traffic, Google enforcing minimum bids on paid and the trigger is competitor activity on paid. When you say there's no difference in SERPs, are you talking about organic rankings or the entire SERP?

[masterjoe]

I mean the entire serps. I have since stopped all paid campaigns but may do it for terns that I know convert... however, even doing this I still experience huge bouts of converting traffic and then days where my money is just going down the drain. The average position stays the same. I've also noticed that Google wasnt always honoring my negative keywords even though the match types were correct and should have been filtered out, high qs ads after a lot of testing and so on.

[glakes]

Simon, I operate in a very small industry. Amazon is not bidding on the primary buyer keywords in either text ads or shopping campaigns. In other words, paid Amazon ads or even text ads for that matter is a non-issue. Shopping ads normally contain 2 or 3 of the same competing product, just from different sellers. And Google almost always places the shopping campaign ads directly above the search results in desktop search.

Since nobody is bidding on text ads, I've been inclined to think that Google is trying to change that by flooding businesses with so many zombies that they would be inclined to buy text ads. I tried that, and even with low bids that appear on the first page of the search results my CPA was horrible. So if Google were trying to drive businesses into text ads, they definitely won't and have not kept them once they get there.

The fact that you're turning your campaigns on and off every time things change tells me that you don't really understand Adwords. Doing Adwords properly is seriously complex.

I'm no expert in Adwords, and it has grown complex and can be cumbersome, but I had profitable campaigns for years. September 2015 changed that and no new players entered Adwords to facilitate this. The massive levels of crap traffic and the resulting high CPA are purely controlled by Google. Adwords is a waste of money and may campaigns stay off most of the times except when I see some sort of update. The reason they get shut off afterwards is because Google is sending crap traffic and nobody in their right mind can afford a CPA that is four times the retail cost of the product. I may not understand Adwords as well as others, but I do understand what massive losses look like. And I'm not alone in not running text ads. What few businesses I compete with have tested as well and quickly departed. While I don't feel singled out by Google, it's hard to explain the crap zombie traffic away as my fault or blaming it on more competition because there is none.

[ecommerceprofit]

Good data glakes...no competition bidding on text ads is quite interesting.

[glakes]

Good data glakes...no competition bidding on text ads is quite interesting.

There used to be text ads for my buyer keywords in Google last year, including mine, but I suspect what few competitors I have absorbed too many losses to continue just as I have. However, shopping campaigns remain quite close to what they were last year and as I noted previously, there really is not a diverse product selection to choose from because the number of competing products is rather limited. Even with the lack of advertisers and diversity, it's impossible to extract a positive ROI from Google Adwords. Every other search engine has no problems with conversions, and there are text ads in Bing/Yahoo. Once again leading to my belief that Google has decimated the very small industry I'm in and why advertisers have abandoned Google's text ads. One would think no competition in Adwords text ads would provide a great opportunity, but the CPA of text ads is even worse then an already terrible shopping campaign.

Competitors are not clouding what may be happening in my industry and how it relates to Adwords conversions - my industry is that small and the lack of new entrants provides for a stable test bed. The poor quality of traffic that Google is producing is most likely intentional - trying to artificially boost Adwords sales and profits through crap traffic. And my industry may be so small that Google does not care if we don't pay for traffic because all they are intent on sending is crap. Though Rank Brain may be a reason why Google's traffic is so bad, I find it very hard to believe that machine learning would be so stupid that it could not figure out after a year how terrible it is doing. I have GA on with ecommerce tracking so I am feeding the Rank Brain all the info it should need, which clearly shows how Bing and Yahoo outperforms Google by multiples with just a fraction of the traffic.

I would like to know what changed on 9/1 that produced quality traffic (free and paid) from Google. It was not the typical zombie pattern because the following days gradually got worse until it was pure zombie traffic. Organic ranks did not change nor did the paid ads. It was the same set of search results before 9/1 as it was on that day and as it is today. And Amazon's quality score is a non-issue because they are not bidding on the primary buyer keywords but have the same domain crowding/positions that they've had in organic results for a long time.

[aristotle]

glakes wrote:
I would like to know what changed on 9/1 that produced quality traffic (free and paid) from Google. It was not the typical zombie pattern because the following days gradually got worse until it was pure zombie traffic.

Here's one theory that you won't like at all. I proposed it here somewhere a few months ago and got a very negative reaction then and will probably do so again..

Theory:
-- Google can identify many of the searchers who know what they want and are ready to buy. Call them "likely buyers".

-- Google periodically begins sending these identified likely buyers to a particular ecommerce site to test its ability to convert.

-- As data on conversions (and non-conversions) accumulates, a judgement is made, and if it's a negative judgement, Google begins sending the likely buyers somewhere else.

[NickMNS]

@aristotle the theory makes sense to me.

Buyers with intent to buy are sent to one group of sites, buyers with unknown intent are sent to another. The unknown group of sites see zombie like behavior because high variability in conversions, whereas the buy group of sites sees higher than average conversion rate and most importantly consistency.

This seems to be supported by a lousy blog post published on Moz this morning. Which suggests that [higher traffic == higher conversion rates]. This is not exactly the experience of those posting in this thread. But the blog, only eludes to correlation between traffic and conversion, and I believe the author has trouble with concepts of correlation vs causation vs attribution, but I digress.

So if we invert the equation: [high conversion == higher traffic] then this falls in line with your theory.

Note that this situation is mostly undetectable for those in the unknown group, as a review of the serps will reveal your site in the top of the rankings, since when checking the rankings you will mostly likely be categorized as a user with unknown intent to buy.

It would be interesting to see if sites with higher conversion rates have lower conversion rate variability than those with low conversion rates.

[smilie]

@masterjoe: Conversions have almost dropped off completely for a few weeks now, things are very poor.

Ours are also dead for 2 weeks. Labor Day is not our week, usually, but not dead.

Guys, listen to what @aristotle says, I am on the same page with him about what constitutes zombie traffic.

@aristotle: Here's my theory in a nutshell:

Zombie traffic = ordinary normal traffic with the likely buyers removed

In other words, Google identifies people who know what they want and are ready to buy, then uses various methods to entice (divert) them to favored sites. The rest of the traffic stays the same, but since it doesn't produce many sales, people call it zombie traffic.

I will go even further to say that I know how Google removes likely buyers or someone who already bought. One avenue is through "free" Google Analytics conversions script. Your buyers are accounted for, put into a separate dataset as "visitors that search for and bought X", and then sold to the highest bidding competitors via Adwords Broad match next time they search for products in your niche. While you keep getting "visitors who browsed X but are not intended buyers or never bought". As buyers get continuously removed from this dataset (because Google profits IMMENSELY, in probably in Billions of dollars per year from this), Zombies got worse over time.

[edited by: smilie at 5:11 pm (utc) on Sep 12, 2016]

[smilie]

>> @ecommerceprofit: Posters who had zombie problems in 2012 (same problem we are experiencing in 2015) who don't post to webmasterworld anymore: backdraft7, gadget26 (told everyone he declared bankruptcy in his last post), scottsonline, stuartc1, timwilliams, ohno, rjwmotor, sechecker, xcoder, typicalsurfer, bluntforce, I wonder how many shut their doors for good?


Everybody I know personally in ecommerce industry since 2012 is either a) closed shop, b) sold out , c) changed industry , or d) surviving by selling on Amazon. I am one of two people left standing with stand alone ecommerce site. The second person who stands has a Ivy League version of Master's tech degree and has been working on websites for 20 years.

Survival rate of average Joe, mom-and-pop stores online are extremely low. For instance, 4 of my competitors who stand have 1+ million dollar warehouses (one doesn't do that many actual online transactions as they are a local vendor). They have dedicated tech and web people and/or teams and money. Mom-and-pop per se is dead. There's way too many land mines, you step on one and your site is toast.

About Amazon. Every single person had to go through Amazon ban. One person had to open new company as Amazon bans vendors like a drunken sailor. One person changed niche. About 25 of my products were stolen and are now Amazon's bestsellers in our niche as we were banned recently.

@ecommerceprofit: From the 5th until this morning the 10th we were on HOT - almost too many orders. Now nothing. Staffing is a nightmare - makes it almost impossible to plan for the future with this up / down. BTW, during down periods seems like we get more people trying to commit credit card fraud. My theory after all this analyzing of other people's experiences is we are on a test list that Google runs. Would like to hear from 2012 zombie thread people like shaddows

Same here, I even tell this to Google open text, at their Adwords reps questions "what's your best days of sales" - no longer possible to identify due to SERPs fluctuations and zombies.

[edited by: smilie at 5:06 pm (utc) on Sep 12, 2016]

[glakes]

As data on conversions (and non-conversions) accumulates, a judgement is made, and if it's a negative judgement, Google begins sending the likely buyers somewhere else.

While anything is possible, I don't think this theory applies. On 9/1/2016 we were converting in Adwords at 7%. Now nearly 0%. I highly doubt any of our few competitors even came close to that 7% conversion rate on 9/1 because their products are similarly priced and of a much lower quality. Also, your theory would leave only one Adwords advertising business getting all of the sales, which would be a huge incentive for people to leave. And with nobody bidding on text ads in my industry for the best buyer keywords, that sends a strong signal to me that everyone is getting garbage traffic from Google just as I am.

[Wijnand schouten]

@smilie

I will go even further to say that I know how Google removes likely buyers or someone who already bought. One avenue is through "free" Google Analytics conversions script. Your buyers are accounted for, put into a separate dataset as "visitors that search for and bought X", and then sold to the highest bidding competitors via Adwords Broad match next time they search for products in your niche.

100% right. :)

[NickMNS]

@glakes the same theory applies to Adwords, you can even pay to change groups using enhanced bidding.

The experience you describe:

we were converting in Adwords at 7%. Now nearly 0%.

this demonstrates what I explain above:

The unknown group of sites see zombie like behavior because high variability in conversions

Specifically high variability in conversions. You are seeing one 7% conversion a few days 0% another day 5% then 0.5% and on. Whereas a non-zombie site would see a consistent pattern of conversions in the range of say 2 to 2.5% day in and day out.

In my mind this is a testable / falsifiable theory. Take a large group of sites, measure conversion rates over wide period of time say two to six month. Divide the sites into low conversion rate sites, (bottom quartile) and high conversion rate sites (top quartile) if the variance in conversion rate for the low conversion rate sites is not significantly higher then the high conversion rate sites then the theory is false.

Clearly Google is already publicly segmenting user as low / high potential to convert as you can buy access to the high converters with Adwords enhanced bidding.

Moreover this same general concept is in use on the Adsense side of the business, with smart-pricing. This where Adsense penalizes publishers when they detect an usually high CTR paired with an unusually low user conversion rate. They penalize the publishers buy limiting participation of their inventory in high value actions.

What's more is that this isn't a conspiracy theory or some evil Google plot. It is good for the users. Users who intends on buying, will be directed to a site were past data has shown that more people will buy from, that means it must be good or at least better the other sites. Obviously, if you are not the top site it royally sucks. We know Google's priority is it users, not the website owners.

What makes this particularly bad is that it is a winner take all scenario. With an increasing share of buying customers being directed to the winning site, it will continue to increase its conversion rate, reinforcing Google's selection bias, thus feeding it even more buyers. The loosing sites will have a harder and harder time trying to dig themselves out of this position, as they will be fed more and more buyer with no intention to buy. There will come a point when giving away product for free may not be sufficient to increase conversion. But what it will do is cause more variability in the conversion rate since any time a buyer does show-up on the site with "free" stuff they will jump on it.

One last point, the winner in most cases is most likely Amazon, which would explain is domination of the serps.