Surge in Google Organic traffic per GA - no traffic change in WMT

[HoosierBuff]

Trying to unwrap this mystery - a surge in Google Organic traffic in GA (like 400 visits per day vs. the previous average of like 10), but no change at all in traffic per WMT. It's been over a week now, and it would have registered in WMT.

I have checked with the client, they aren't aware of any advertising campaigns, or anything like that. They primarily use this site for careers, but, I checked in Google Jobs, they really don't refer people to the site at all.

Any idea of what this could be?

 

[Digitaldar]

could someone have made a change to Google Analytics? e.g. from HTTP to https or updated an old domain to the current domain name?

 

[Joey Abna]

What is the landing page that is receiving this spike in traffic? Is it one page or several pages? Dig around in the Secondary Dimensions. A few ways I might slice it up would be country, device category, user type, browser version and language.

 

[HoosierBuff]

Thanks Joey - that was good advice.

I found that that the new traffic is about 50/50 US/Canadian (which is really odd), and about 75% mobile. The traffic actually stays and visits the site more than usual (not much more, but, it's not like a 99% bounce rate, and .01 duration, it's more like 25 seconds, 1.5 pages consumed.

@Digitaldar - good advice as well. I checked there were no obvious changes to GA or the domains. I also went back and verified all versions of the domain in WMT (https://www. https:// http:// etc.) - Google seems to only have https://www. in the serps, and that is what we were looking at, but, maybe something else is going on.

 

[Digitaldar]

Is this new traffic always entering on the homepage or a variety of pages? Could you have received a new link which boosted your visibility in Google?

 

[tarantino75]

Have you looked to see if it was a "traffic bot" of any kind? Sometimes there are names within the keyword section. Odd, but it can happen.

 

[HoosierBuff]

Yeah, it very well could be "new traffic" there are reasons why the site should get more traffic

- The traffic is coming through GA as Google Organic
- No evidence of any bot that I can tell (no tell tale keywords or referral sources or anyting)
- Landing page is normal (home page)
- There is no change in Google WMT traffic (like for the last 10 days)


HMMMM. It does look like the corporate office GMB is now showing up all over the country (as a knowledge panel). . . which would account for the change, BUT I thought that would show up in WMT....right?

 

[andrewthorn]

With those dwell times and bounce rates, I would suggest bot activity. Some times the bots will use UTM to reclassify their bot traffic as organic, paid etc via UTM just to screw up your analytics data.

Go into campaigns and see if there is anything in there that looks strange and also look at Refferals. Because a lot of this is Ghost Refferal spam traffic.

 

[HoosierBuff]

Do knowledge panel impressions count in WMT? I think this is part of the difference.

 

[Conor Treacy]

I don't have anything to back up any claims of the GMT tracking the knowledge panel, but I'd guess it would be the same as a Position 0 snippet. Does that count as an impression in GMT, and if so, how would that show in the "Queries > Position" section. I know there's keywords in average position 1, but there's no "0" position in any of the sites I've looked at.

 

[Joey Abna]

I don't have a solid answer for your question about Knowledge Panel Impressions count in GSC/WMT. But, if you have UTM tagged the links in your GMB listing look in GSC/WMT for those page urls. You can change the date range, view the queries that are driving the impressions for the urls etc. Maybe you can find some useful data that way.