Referral Traffic from Google

[RASEO]

Hello, I have a question about my company's new website. I've worked in SEO and studied Google Analytics results for a few years now but have never really come across something like this.

I started in this position in January of this year and when I started breaking down the traffic sources in Google Analytics, I noticed most of the traffic was coming from Google.com as a referral source. I had never seen Google.com as a referral source before so I looked into options for what it could be. It was not a paid ad and our organic traffic was coming through in Analytics, Before I could get any further, our new website was launched (we switched CRM's to WordPress) and the referral traffic from google went from 2,966 in January of 2015 to 22 in February 2015. for more comparison, in February of 2014, the referral traffic from Google was 2,496.

I expected a drop when we switched CRM's but we correctly re-directed all pages and created a new sitemap and our organic traffic is up since the switch (not enough to cover drop in referral). I thought at first this had to do with our Google sellers account being de-activated when we made the switch, but I quickly fixed this over a month ago and no change.

I'm wondering if anyone has ever seen Google.com come through as a referral source in Google Analytics and if they we're able to figure out what it actually was. This would be a great help!

Thank you,

Alex

[katemorris]

Not saying that is it 100% but that could be a major part of the issue. I would talk with the agency running the PPC and let them know the issue and have them pair the AdWords and Analytics accounts.

[Interdirect]

No, unfortunately not. We are an agency, however the client has hired someone else to run their PPC campaign so we don't have their campaign data linked to GA.

[katemorris]

Hmmm, is your adwords account hooked up to your analytics account?

Can you click into the results going to the homepage and set that secondary dimension to country? That should be a possibility, a location of some kind.

[Interdirect]

Hi Kate, yes there are 1,374 sessions.

Half of them are going to the homepage "/"

Then there are around 350 going to promo single URL pages from PPC campaigns (so I understand the reason for those).

Around 100 are going to the "About Us" and "contact us" pages. Could these be ad extensions?

[katemorris]

Is there much traffic coming in this way? The above would suggest the referral is from the google.co.uk homepage, is not passing the referral page, or is from something internal as /url isn't a thing. I've seen all of this before, so you are not going nuts, but I don't have a concise answer. I can tell you that your search traffic should be going to organic and this should be something like news, images, or another google property. Most likely it's traffic that is blocking referral info.

So I am hoping it's not much traffic. Where is the traffic going? Set that secondary dimension to landing page and let me know.

[Interdirect]

Hi Kate,

I found this forum stream - we're having a similar situation. I tried your suggestion. Our top referrer is Google.co.uk. When I add the secondary dimension "Full Referrer" It says:

1. "/"                         google.co.uk/

2. "(not set)"             google.co.uk

3. "/url"                      google.co.uk/url

[katemorris]

My answer was going to be much like Dirks. There are some Google properties that send traffic as referral, not as search. Can you take a look at the referral traffic from google.com and add "Full Referrer" as a Secondary Dimension and let us know what that is?

[RASEO]

Thanks for help DC! I looked into both your suggestions, and our image search has dropped but not nearly enough to account for the drop in traffic and I looked into where most of the referral traffic from Google was coming from and it was the US.

Anyone else have any ideas on where the referral traffic from Google would have been coming from and why it dropped off the face of the earth with the new site when everything else has gone up?

Thank you!

[DirkC]

In countries where the "old" image search is still used (like Germany) - it is counted as Referral traffic rather than search traffic (not sure why). You could check in Webmastertools what your % of image search is (and compare January & February)

You could also try to check the landing pages report for this referral traffic and compare this with the landingpages in Acquisition >Search Engine Optimisation > Landingpages with secondary dimension "Google Property"

rgds,

Dirk