Big Drop in Traffic ... What to Look For

What other factors could cause such a big drop in traffic?

[ibridge]

My site has experienced a big decrease (>20%) in average daily traffic in just the last several days. I've checked all the following:

1) Google PR - no change for index page
2) Major search engine rankings - no big drops at all
3) In-bound links - no sudden decrease in the number of in-bound links
4) Downtime - monitoring service shows no downtime for the last four weeks.

What else could I check or could be causing this? Anywhere else I can look for clues?

Thanks,
Beth

[chiyo]

If its a btob site, easter is coming up and there are quite a few holiday periods worldwide right now. We find our traffic starts slowing down right from the start of the week where there is a major holiday worldwide.

Is the fall all atrributable to google referrals or all referrals? thats what we always check - the proportions delivered from each source. If one takes a significant drop or rise (like Google for eg.) we can then target where the problem/opportunity comes from.

Also look for your major competitors maybe starting a new campaign in PPI, PPC, advertising etc.

Also check how many pages you have indexed in Google compared to before. Dont forget those smaller traffic keywords that all add up for google. your major keywords/phrases may be doing well but we have 80% of out google traffic from hundreds of keyword phrases we dont have the time to check regularly.

[keyplyr]

Server down?

<added> Sorry, didn't see the remark about monitoring the server
But could be a DNS issue with a major IP - happens to me occasionally on my carrier. </added>

[ibridge]

Thank you both for the suggestions.

I checked Google referrals and a cursory glance shows the numbers down, but actual percentage up when comparing this (bad) week to the previous (not so bad) week.

I use a free service that checks uptime and they haven't shown anything for the last four weeks.

Also, did email the hosting service and they got back to me just in the time since I've posted... they haven't said anything yet about downtime (assuming that's because they haven't had anything majory) but here's the kicker ...

They reminded me that they've got their own traffic stats info, based directly on hits to the server. I've been using HitBox (which I know, you've got to have the code on the page). Well, what do you know ... the server traffic tells a very different story. Continuing growth. No decline.

So what do you think of that? Think HitBox is haywire? Should I stick with the server stats?

Thanks,
Beth

[Bradley]

Spring break is here in the United States for many schools. Families go on vacation. Perhaps this is a part of your target market and is attributing to your decline in referrals.

[visca]

Some sort of standard checklist should be assembled to assess cause of "not immediately explainable traffic drops". How about this list I whipped up as a starting point.

Check...

1. Google ranking for your major keywords, a sudden lowering in ranking can impact referred traffic.

2. Ranking in top 5 engines aside from Google, your position may have changed in any or all of them.

3. If partner sites or sites that are usually linking to you have for some reason removed your link (go through top 15 referers in log file reports and confirm link still exists).

4. If any of your PPC or advertising campaigns have run out of funding or have stopped unexpectedly.

5. Traffic reports from logs for server outages or higher than acceptable 500 error code rates.

6. If during a recent publishing of changes to your site a section became unaccessible due to broken links.

7. If during a recent publishing of MAJOR changes that the change in usability has caused people to become disoriented and leave your site.

8. If there are currently outside (real world) factors causing lack of traffic such as major world events, school holidays. Christmas, Easter, school exam times, even time of year (Winter vs Summer) can impact traffic levels.

9. Whether worms or other milcious Internet hacking activity is being reported that can impact servers ability to respond to page requests.

10. If there is a problem with your Webservers operating system, Internet connectivity or other hardware / software / connection factor is at play, preventing users from optimally accessing your site.

Additions and tweaks are welcomed.

[DaveN]

ibridge,

always use your server stats these should never lie.

did you ask hitbox if they have had any technical difficulties or downtime

DaveN

[sullen]

DaveN - server stats do lie though. All log analysis progs I have ever used have a big problem with AOL users - AOL don't let their users have a fixed IP for the duration of their connection, and so they get counted as several users.

So in answer to the original question - have a look at your AOL browser % stats. If they are way down this will be affecting your overall stats disproportionately.

However I agree that the holidays are a major factor, especially if your site gets a lot of users who surf from work. Start worrying if the stats are still down after the Easter hols.

<added>have a bit of text-blindeness today, didn't see the bit about the server stats being out of synch with the other ones. Probably your hit-box stats are underestimating users, the server stats overestimating them. It's the way it goes.</added>

[Ankheg]

DNS problems could be at fault. For about a week, one of my sites' DNS wasn't being properly resolved for many customers, apparently all in Qwest "space". They could reach the site fine by using the dotted quad, but for whatever reason the name wasn't resolving correctly. The nameservers were all up, reachable, and returning the correct results, but... Produced about a 20% drop in visitors, page views, and referrals for several days, plus several irate emails and phone calls from customers who couldn't reach the site. Then, suddenly, it was working fine again, and everything went back to normal.

At a hosting company we used to use, but don't, our site was accessable via three backbones - one that predominantly served europe, one that handled most of the south, east, and midwestern U.S., and one that mostly dealt with traffic from the western half of the U.S. and all of Canada. One day, for about eighteen hours, there were multiple faulures on one of these connections, and the routing tables and whatnot didn't update for a loooooong time, resulting in all connections to our site from about half of the U.S timing out. That was a nightmare to figure out, as it was still accessable to us, and our monitoring service, and the host was unhelpful... But I digress.

Point being, there could have been a localised anomaly somewhere that you'd have been hard-pressed to see.

[ibridge]

I appreciate Visca's list. A good checklist.

One other factor might be that I didn't add HitBox to some pages. I haven't yet correlated the traffic on those pages as reported by the server, but it seems like an awful big drop for the significance of the pages.

So what I think I'm going to do is this:

Find another way to check the status of the site. Maybe the service I'm using isn't checking very often and there have been bigger outages.

I will also see how many pages I did leave the HitBox off of, and check those pages to see how much traffic the server shows them having received.

I will also run a comparison between the two reports and will probably go with the one that appears to be the most consistent!

This site is for a client and these changes have been making him crazy ... and therefore making me crazy.

Beth