50% drop in direct traffic

Hello, I recently saw a drop of 50% in visits from direct traffic in one month on the site I manage. Direct traffic went from 82,000 in June to 40,000 in July, and since then has remained at approximately 40,000. I did not see any sources increase so it wasn't a matter of traffic going from one source to another.

In looking at the details, the direct traffic to the home page did not drop by a significant amount in this time period. It was traffic to the internal pages that showed a significant drop. I have some internal pages which saw a 95% drop in user sessions from direct traffic. Of course, this seems illogical to me because I wouldn't expect direct traffic to really hit internal pages.

One other thing to point out--we do have a significant issue with invalid traffic, which is at about 20% according to our Moat reports. Can I assume the direct traffic decline is related to invalid traffic?


Thank you.

 

And you expect us to tell you what is wrong when we cannot examine the patient?

 

You need to analyse the data of the IP addresses. Did you took any traffic service from a third party. It looks like bots visiting your website and spamming on the website. Those spammer even create fake email address and use multiple ip addresses to create accounts.

 

What I would be looking at is did your conversion rate drop or go up now that that traffic is gone. Look at bounce rate did it improve a good amount as well. If so then its possible that was just filler traffic that either someone bought and forgot about or someone was sending traffic your way.

 

The reason could be mobile first indexing. The timing is perfect (June - July). If your site isn't performing well on mobile devices (slow loading, css issues) it will impact your traffic on laptops / desktops as well.

More here: https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2018/03/rolling-out-mobile-first-indexing.html