Ideas on why Pages Per Visit Dropped?

[Aggie]

Week over week our pages per visit continue to drop.  Any ideas on where to look to diagnose?

[irvingw]

Did you update any navigation lately?

Are pages still properly tagged with analytics?

Have you seen a spike in 404 pages?

Are visitors coming from the same places, or are you getting unqualified traffic?

[Aggie]

Irving-

404 pages seem to be stable as do referring sites, and no navigation updates.  I'm not sure about the GA tagging.  I did not implement the tagging, so I wouldn't know where to look to find out.

Any guidance would be much appreciated.

Thanks,

Lisa

[TomRayner]

Hi Aggie

This really could be a number of things, but there's a few places to start looking.

First, I would jump into your webmaster tools and see if you have had a spike in errors, which you can find in the traffic tab.  If the Googlebot is seeing 404 or server errors, your users might be getting the same thing.  Look for any spikes in those graphs and see if there is anything that might put a user off.

Next, I would look at segmenting your analytics data.  Are you looking at all of your traffic as a whole? It may be worthwhile to look at the data over time in segments, such as the non-paid search, referral, and paid search segments Google analytics provides.  It may be that there is one particular traffic channel that is driving the "bad" traffic - such as PPC ads that aren't converting or referral traffic from a new partner.  For instance, one of my clients places a banner on an affiliated website with its own tracking URL.  We saw traffic increase over a number of weeks, but bounce rate, dwell time and pages per visit fell and it turned out that the users referred from the banner were, by in large, bouncing straight off.  After running it for a bit longer, we decided to remove the banner as it wasn't driving relevant traffic.  If you see anything unnatural in these segments, you might be able to identify the cause.

Similarly, have you started ranking for any "educational" terms lately?  By that I mean, have you started ranking for terms like "what is [keyword]" or "[keyword] explained"? If so, you may be getting traffic for the terms, but because your landing pages have served their purpose, users are arriving, reading, and leaving.  Not a lot you can do in this case to improve pages per visit, but you could be able to capture some lead data by adding an email signup to those landing pages.

You should also have a look at your user journeys in Google analytics, which you can find if you go to Audience -> Visitors Flow in the left hand side navigation.  See if you can see a pattern here - are there particularly pages that users are going to that has seen a jump in exit rate over time?  Look at those pages - has any HTML/javascript code gone wrong? Is anything broken on those pages? Are they, in fact, just low quality pages that you could improve?  This might also reveal something.

Don't be too worried though if you can't see anything standing out.  Sometimes these things happen and recover - other times user behaviour simply changes. These methods above might be able to point out any faults you need to address or any improvements you could make.  But if your traffic and conversions are steady, pages per visit decreasing isn't such a bad thing.  In fact, if conversions are steady (how ever you measure them), one could argue that users taking a shorter time (and journey) to convert show that they're trusting your brand and website more to make the decision earlier.

Hope this helps Aggie!

[Aggie]

Thanks, Tom. I'm quite puzzled because I don't see anything that would indicate why organic search pages per visit have dropped 7%.

404s and server errors are fairly stable.  We did see a spike last Monday from spam that we have since fixed, so not sure if that would translate to organic.

Our organic traffic was growing in the teens week over week, and in the past few weeks, we are down by 2% or flat.  I know this is kind of a micro look, but I try to stay on top of things as much as possible.

And now the pages per visit are down two weeks in a row.  We're a news media site, so I'm trying to see if I can see a pattern, but can't seem to find one.

Thanks for your input.

If any other ideas pop into your head about pages per visit or ideas on stabilizing traffic, I'd be grateful.

Thanks,

Lisa

[EGOL]

We're a news media site,

This is some of the most volatile stuff on the web.

Really... if you have concerns and don't know what's going on it would be best to hire a pro to review the site instead of chasing shots in the dark from people who have never seen the site.

Your effort and theirs could be divining for a problem that does not exist.

[Aggie]

Thanks for your candor, EGOL.  Was just looking for some insight on where I might look outside of the obvious markers I'd already evaluated.

These forums have been been extremely helpful in the past when folks have encountered similar issues before mine.

Have a great day!