So, like many of you first thing this morning I am going over stats to see how things are looking. It’s kind of my routine look at traffic look at rankings and then start the day.
Well today I look, and I see a giant drop in traffic to some of my sites that usually are pretty rock solid, and the coffee just did not taste as good!
Google Analytics Traffic Reporting Glitch - Breathe Easy!
Thanks to Search Engine Roundtable which I would recommend you subscribe to if you have an interest in what goes on in the world of Google and search engine optimization. Thanks to those guys reporting that a lot of SEO’s where freaking out about a possible google update and traffic drops it turn out the most likely issue is a bug in GA that caused a glitch.
So, here is how my day went after looking at this giant drop in stats.
- I went and looked to see if my Google Analytics code was working on the site and that it was included on all pages.
- I also did an update to some of the sites since Word Press released another core update. This caused me to go and look to see if the site is working in general.
- I went and looked at my keyword tracking tools and looked at rankings which were all pretty much where they had been.
- After that I just pretty much breathed easy assured that my site is fine and that this was obviously some weird glitch that caused my GA to look like we lost half our traffic.
The lesson here is that just because one tool says one thing check everything else out as well and see if the overall picture tells the same story. I have had this happen in reverse before where all my rankings dropped according to the rank tracking tool, I was using but the site was up everything looked fine and GA traffic was the same as it had been. Sure enough after about 24 hours they tool announced that they were having issues with rank reporting and it would be fixed.
So What’s The Lesson Here?
Simple don’t freak out when one tool says something. Take a deep breath and relax and check all your tools and act or don’t act based on what the overall picture is. I think we’re all sensitive to Google so when they say something is off people tend to freak out and take action instead of taking a minute to assess the situation and then decide based upon on the entire picture either take action or wait and see how things actually develop.
Thanks for reading my rant! If you need help with your next marketing project that requires an seo expert in Houston please call or contact us and let us see if we can help!
