“Our traffic is going down,” said a client in a recent email. Attached to the email was a chart showing this year’s traffic compared to last year’s traffic. Yep, traffic had indeed gone down.
The reason for the downward trend was easy to diagnose: we had created a Filtered View in Google Analytics, which excluded traffic coming from the people within the client’s company who accessed the website daily. More important, we had excluded referral spam. The referral spam had become so bad, it had outpaced organic search and was skewing data in the worst way.
I explained to the client that due to the filters, comparing this year’s traffic to the previous year was exactly like comparing apples to oranges — and that traffic was actually doing quite well (as were his inquiries, which he did acknowledge were on the rise).
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