Diagnosing a Decline in Traffic

Owned by Faith Bakewell (Deactivated)
Sept 05, 2023
4 min read

Goal: Find out how much traffic you have lost and find the major culprits of that decline, whether it be individual pages or large sections of a website. For traffic declines, I recommend finding the problem in GA and doing a deep dive in GSC for a complete picture.

Step 1 - Google Analytics

Make sure you are looking at just organic traffic. Select organic as the audience or as a channel.

 

  • Report: Acquisition > All Traffic > Channels. Choose ‘Landing Page’ as the primary dimension.

    1. Look, at minimum, last 3 months of traffic.

    2. Look at the last full year of traffic to check for seasonality.

    3. Compare previous MOM.

    4. Compare previous YOY.

    5. Once you have your time frame(s) narrowed down, keep them in mind for all analysis.

  • Check which groups of pages were most affected. By checking your top page types, you should be able to narrow down which sections of the site are causing the decline. Consider creating a table with your top page categories along with total sessions and their change YOY or MOM.

  • After you have found which areas of the sites have caused the most traffic decline, you can dive deeper into the top trafficked pages in each section to see if ALL those pages have declines OR if there are just a few.

  • If all your pages declined it might be seasonality or if there is no seasonality in your site, then you will need to explore Google Search Console to dive into indexation, ranking, and crawling issues.

  • Also important to check direct, referral, and paid channels to see if a large organic traffic loss coincided with an increase to any of the other channels.

 

Step 2 - Google Search Console

You should be able to diagnose your traffic issues with Google Search Console. 16 months of available search data allows you to check for long term trends, YOY metrics, and MOM metrics with ease.

 

Performance Report

You should be able to get your answer from this report. If your data is inconclusive, then try the coverage report below. Once you know which page(s) or page groups have dropped, you can start to look at clicks, impressions, CTR, and average ranks in Search Console.

  • Questions to ask:

    • Have certain pages or page groups declined more than others, or evenly across all? If certain pages, what if anything do those pages have in common?

    • Are there specific keywords or keyword groups that have declined more than others? Branded traffic affected?

    • Has traffic declined on certain devices, or uniformly across all?

    • Has coverage or indexation changed?

  • Report Tips

    • Start with a few months to a year of data and then try date comparisons.

    •  

Coverage Report

  • Questions to ask:

    • Is there an increase in Server Errors, Soft 404s, or Not Found errors?

    • Is there a sharp decline in the number of indexed pages, or an increase non-indexed or erroring pages?

 

 

Step 3 (If Needed) - AHREFs 

Use AHREFs for supplemental analysis.

Keyword Rankings

Check tracked keywords in your site’s website project OR you can check your site’s organic keywords with historical comparison in the ‘Organic Keywords 2.0’ report in Site Explorer.

Keyword Volume Changes

If you need to check volume trends for specific keywords you can do that in the ‘Keyword Explorer’ report in the 2nd box from the right (below).

 

 

SERP Changes

You can look at SERP changes in the ‘Keywords Explorer’ report in the 3rd box from the right (above). This is a handy widget that shows how SERP changes like no-click searches, ppc click share, and organic click share change over time.

 

 

Additional Resources

Losing Website Traffic? Learn to Diagnose Traffic Drops

Diagnosing a traffic drop? Just breathe!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Diagnosing a Decline in Revenue

Goal: Find out about how much organic revenue your site is down and find the major culprits of that decline, whether it be individual pages, large sections of a website, or issues with tracking. If you found a drop in traffic in the steps above, does that traffic drive a lot of revenue?

 

Questions to Ask:

  • Did products change?

  • Were there market changes?

  • Have you accounted for seasonality?

  • Were their website tweaks like U/X changes?

 

Step 1 - Google Analytics

Make sure you are looking at just organic traffic. Select organic as the audience or as a channel. Seasonality might play a big role in your revenue decline, so make sure to look at larger date sets but stay focused on month-to-month analysis.

 

Report Suggestions:

  • Acquisition > All Traffic > Channels. Choose ‘Landing Page’ as the primary dimension.

  1. Look, at minimum, last 3 months of traffic.

  2. Look at the last full year of traffic to check for seasonality.

  3. Compare previous MOM.

  4. Compare previous YOY.

  5. Once you have your time frame(s) narrowed down, keep them in mind for all analysis.

  • Product revenue report

    1. Looking to see if any specific products dropped.

  • Assisted revenue report

 

  1. Pick a time frame and check which groups of pages had the most revenue decline. By checking your top page types, you should be able to narrow down which sections of the site are causing the decline. Consider creating a table with your top page categories along with total revenue and their change YOY or MOM.

  2. After you have found which areas of the sites have caused the most revenue decline, you can dive deeper into the top revenue pages in each section to see if ALL those pages have declines OR if there are just a few. 

 

After you have completed this section, head on up to Step 2 in the ‘Diagnosing a Decline in Traffic’ section to look into potential reasons why revenue has declined.