Recently, one of our clients’ websites was facing an issue: they faced a 19% drop in organic traffic compared to the previous period.
This type of drop isn’t overly alarming at first, as it’s particularly substantial and could be correlated to a normal organic fluctuation after experiencing an influx of traffic in the previous period. However, during our advanced analysis process of diving deeper into the issue to pinpoint the exact cause of the drop, we realized it was correlated to a one-day spike in traffic that occurred in the previous period.
The one-day spike in traffic had the characteristics of bot traffic and was deemed harmless as it was no indication of a drop in performance on the website.
We were able to confirm this spike was bot traffic by looking deeper into the dimensions of the traffic and determining that almost all of the traffic on the day of the spike was on a single page and that the traffic was sourced almost entirely from countries outside of the U.S.
To address the issue, our team adjusted the analytics settings for the website to filter out bot traffic moving forward so it would not negatively affect reports. We were skeptical of the drop initially as all of their lead sources were up compared to the previous period. Ultimately, these types of situations are beneficial as they can help us re-strategize to make adjustments to all of our clients’ analytics to prevent these types of skews in data for future reporting.