Sudden Drop In Icegram Clicktrhoguhs Starting Sep. 25th

[Planet13]

I use icegram to encourage clicking from my information pages to my product pages.

Starting on Sep. 25th, it seems the clickthrough rate dropped nearly 70%

Icegram doesn't have a user forum, and their wordpress support page doesn't seem to get much love from the people who make it.

Was there some major browser update which is blocking the various popups / navigation bars by icegram?

Since all my icegram links point to the same page, I am viewing the visits to that single page in google analytics, which is showing me the 70
70% drop in visits.

Otherwise, traffic to my site seems consistent, and the pages where the icegram links show up are getting the same traffic as before.

Thanks in advance, and apologies in advance to the moderators if for some reason this question violates the WebmasterWorld terms of service. If it does, please kindly re-word it for me in a more generic form. Thanks.

[not2easy]

I'm not familiar with icegram, so I am guessing it is a plugin? Are you seeing the same browser used on these 70% of your visitors? Then I might think the browser is causing the drop. If all the links go to the same page, why not replace the plugin with a plain link? Or did the plugin sort of make people go to the page? If it was a lightbox or pop-up, visitors may just exit.

[Planet13]

@ not2easy:

Thanks for the reply.

Icegram is, indeed, something of a pop-up. The way I have it set up is that one is a "permanent" footer bar.

the other two slide into view after the visitor has been on the page for a certain length of time (one after 30 seconds, one after a minute or so).

The reason for these (admittedly annoying) popups is because they scroll with the screen and are always in the viewable area (as opposed to links that the visitor might scroll past).

Prior to the 25th of septemeber, lots of people were clicking through to the other page, but then it dropped on the 25th.

I will have to check on the browser usage though.

[Planet13]

Regarding Browsers:

It looks like the click-throughs from different browsers were somewhat equal in the amount they dropped:

Safari -60%

Chrome -68%

Safari (in-app) -67%

Internet Explorer -41%

Firefox -43%

So it doesn't look like one single browser is blocking any more than the other.

And looking at my main landing page (the page where the popups appear), there is no big change in traffic, and no big change in browser usage between the time before the 25th of September and the time after.

[martinibuster]

Have you tried clicking through to see if the plug in is working? Sometimes various scripts interfere with each other, like different jquery versions, things like that. An across the board drop along the same amounts seems to indicate that it's not a browser blocker because there wouldn't be such similarity across devices. So maybe something wrong with the plugin which is causing it to not work 70% of the time.

Failing that, then try an additional traffic analyzer or even a log analyzer, see if they agree with what GA is reporting, in order to rule out a GA bug. GetClicky etc.

[Planet13]

Thanks for the suggestions, martinibuster:

I tried visiting my pages using chrome, opera, and FF, and the popups all seemed to work fine.

I checked with clicky, and it is similar to GA: Just a big drop-off on the 25th of September.

I think the next logical option is a problem with the plugin, or with the CDN I use?