4 Reasons Your Website Traffic Decreases

Are you seeing a decrease in site traffic? Here are 4 situations when dips in traffic are expected and normal.

1. Moved internal content off your website.

If internal users were a big audience for your site, it makes sense that the traffic will go down when the content they wanted is no longer there. Why this is OK: Your site is now refined for your target audience (prospective students) rather than serving as an “intranet.”

2. Started sending paid traffic to a campaign landing page or microsite.

Often, we see that analytics were not added to the landing page or microsite. Why this is OK: It really is ok! 😊 But it is a great indicator that you need to add analytics to that property.

3. Internal school computers no longer default to your website homepage.

Those unintentional visits were inflating your session and user counts. Why this is OK: Removing those bounces reduces the noise that hides your “real” site visitors.

4. Google is providing clickless answers on more of your site content.

More user questions are being answered on the Google search result page. On average, 3-5% of searchers get answers without clicking through to your website. Why this is OK: Your site is ranking well with Google, and you are seen as a source of truth. While a sign that your content is authoritative, performance can’t be tracked in analytics and requires digging into the search console. Clickless behavior is difficult to quantify, but it remains a benefit to the user and a reflection of high ranking for your content.

Sometimes traffic goes down for understandable reasons and seasons. Understanding these data situations can help you provide better insight to your stakeholders.

Need help setting up analytics? Contact me to learn how we help clients answer these questions and learn more about our proprietary audit.

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