eCommerce tap turned off or?

[w_hebb]

Hi:
Been lurking and learning here for years running a few successful eCommerce sites and forgot my login - so I have reregistered. Always saw what I thought was G turning on the eCommerce tap around late November and then turning it off in mid January. We saw a 60-70% drop in traffic around 18 January 2017 which has thence seem to have no more that 5% variance any given day - as if- hard to not believe we are being throttled - and wondering if;

1. Did other eCommerce sites see a similar drop off that might be attributed to G turning off the Christmas season eCommerce tap at about the same time?
2. We do not use any form of interstitial, so I have been assuming we should not have been hit by that algo that rolled out mid January.

Went back several times and reread the January threads, cannot seem to think that our websites should have been hit by the January roll out based on the inputs in that thread. I have not posted, because I kept hoping for a recovery, but I am getting very worried.

Thoughts on 1 and 2

TIA,
Bill

[keyplyr]

Hi w_hebb and welcome to WebmasterWorld [webmasterworld.com]

Lots of opinions about updates & how they seem to affect some sites, but not others. I saw nothing specific in January. The March update hit my traffic a bit though.

[w_hebb]

Hi Keyplr:
Despite our traffic down 70%, our conversion rate is up so I assume we are getting a better bunch of visitors. Nonetheless, total conversions and thus revenue is off significantly. We have seen a similar rise around Black Friday and a fall in the following January as it seems like Google assumes more queries are ecommerce - shopping based and directs more to ecommerce sites, but we have never had a sudden drop off as we had this January. We are 70% off, not from the Christmas peak, but from the same month both in late January, February and now March.

One thing we did note is that in the last few months we got hundreds of links, all from the some country - Indonesia. However, none of the links really relates to our niche - gourmet food. From what we can read of the native language Bahasa, the links seem to be from legitimate websites, but valueless to us as we only ship within the US. Very weird.

Kind regards,
Bill

[keyplyr]

For many sites, SE referred traffic is declining, and has been for a long time. This is do to so many apps & Social Media. If you haven't already done so, consider using these other resources to generate incoming traffic. You'll have better control targeting specific niches.

[anallawalla]

Must be very niche specific. I work in-house for some major national brands (same parent company) and organic conversions are rising, year on year. There is some cannibalisation from our own apps as their takeup increases.

[glakes]

Must be very niche specific. I work in-house for some major national brands (same parent company) and organic conversions are rising, year on year.

Big brands have definitely been the winner in Google. And with less ad space, the big brands have the budgets to duke it out there too. What's lost in Google are the small businesses. Though with 55% of ecommerce transactions originating outside of search, Google's stranglehold over ecommerce is slipping and small businesses can compete quite well in other channels.

[w_hebb]

Keyplr, Anallawalla:
I am not referring to a gradual loss of traffic over months or years, I am referring to a drop of 60-70% in one week without recovery. Right around 17 January. Bang. No, we do not use interstitials of any form. No black hat of any form either. Fully responsive, 100% mobile OK, full JSON-LD etc. No manual actions showing in Webmaster. All Webmaster reports are clean, so are the sitemap reports. My first hope was the ecommerce tap turned off and it would settle in a few weeks. Not the case. Thus my question. If I assume it was a double hit, i.e. ecommerce tap off and something else, week on same week, month on same month since then show an average of 50% loss of traffic, 35% loss of conversions.

Thoughts?

TIA,
Bill