Big jump in campaign sessions after site relaunch

[valentinb13]

I'm not complaining, but trying to figure out if there's a good explanation to this:

Client relaunched site in late July — we use UTMs on their 50+ locations — we did nothing with the GMB/UTM before or directly after the launch. We noticed that users and sessions spiked (on our campaigns) right when the site relaunched and it has remained elevated compared to before the relaunch. Bounce rates exploded also though. Any idea why? I would have expected a dip — general organic traffic bumped up a bit, but nothing significant like this...

 

[djbaxter]

What did the relaunch change?

 

[valentinb13]

Complete site redesign, URLs, consolidated pages. Stayed on the same CMS

 

[Cherie Dickey]

The site could be ranking for terms it didn't rank for before if new content was added. Current bounce and time on site look pretty normal to me. In fact, the older numbers look abnormal to me... like someone who goes to the site often didn't exclude their IP address or something.

I would be interested in seeing what these numbers look like when only looking at new users.

 

[valentinb13]

The site could be ranking for terms it didn't rank for before if new content was added. Current bounce and time on site look pretty normal to me. In fact, the older numbers look abnormal to me... like someone who goes to the site often didn't exclude their IP address or something.

I would be interested in seeing what these numbers look like when only looking at new users.

In the screenshot above, New Users (visiting from the GMB profiles) jumped 176% in that time frame. Also, we didn't do anything with their GMBs — in fact, I didn't update the location page URLs on the GMB until about 2 weeks ago. And the spike coincides with the day the site launched — Is it possible for the GMBs to suddenly rank (for more terms) overnight like that?

 

[Zhivko]

I think Google has no clue what they are doing and this is just something random.

What does the GMB statistics show? More calls? More requests for directions? Is the spike caused by just some of your listings or they all exploded?

 

[Cherie Dickey]

@valentinb13 I'm not sure, to be honest. But, I have seen GBL listings rank for searches that they don't have a category set for because the website mentions the service or keyword. So, it's possible that if the site had new content added targeting more keywords, or improved the content for those keywords, then the GBLs linked to the site could have also earned better visibility for those searches. Over night seems a bit fast, but this is Google...and we never can be quite sure what Google is up to, haha

I wouldn't look a gift horse in the mouth though. If this new traffic is quality traffic, then I wouldn't worry too much about it. Hopefully it lasts!