What should you do when your traffic disappears? This happened to me just a few days ago. I logged into my Google Analytics account and found that all of my traffic had pretty much plummeted down to zero. Given that I’m into a few things on this blog that could result in penalties from Google, I was immediately concerned. But here’s the trick to it all. Stay calm.
After the immediate shock, I decided to first verify if I had indeed lost all of my traffic. I logged into my hosting account and checked out my raw logs. Turns out that not only did I not lose all of my traffic, over the affected time period, it looked like it had actually gone up a little. So given that, I assumed it was some kind of problem with my stats and was able to rest well that night. The next morning, I found many reports of people having problems with their statistics. Google had a wide scale backlog and was working to repair the situation.
The lesson is, don’t panic. Even though a situation looks bad upon the initial glance, look at it carefully and make sure that you know what exactly is going on. Lots of people like to take immediate action, but you really should take a moment to clear your head and evaluate the situation properly before you act.
web development, web stats
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8 responses so far ↓
1 BeachBum // Aug 3, 2007 at 12:50 pm
I have a blog that gets very little traffic. Like 5-10 visits a day. Then one day the counter shoots to the top. Here I got mentioned on a CNN blog. So you never know when someone will find your site and link to it.
BeachBum
2 Simon from Cleverkabel // Aug 3, 2007 at 5:29 pm
@BeachBum
Yes, but you really need much luck to get such a link
3 Marc // Aug 4, 2007 at 7:39 am
Yeah, getting a mention like that is a great thing to get, but it actually introduces a whole other set of problems
I suspect your site held up to the influx of traffic?
4 handy tarif // Aug 4, 2007 at 12:43 pm
Heh, the exact same thing happened to me and I kinda panicked ..
I was so relieved when in notices that everything’s alright
5 Marc // Aug 4, 2007 at 1:02 pm
Yeah, it can be a little scary, but the trick is to stay calm. Even if you have lost all your traffic panicking isn’t going to help
6 Retete Culinare // Aug 5, 2007 at 7:18 am
The exact same thing hapend to me with google analytics!
7 Bogge // Aug 6, 2007 at 8:18 am
Same happend for me but with a different cause… I have changed the template of my site and forgot to include the google code, so the stats i was seeing was only the blog traffic…
8 Marc // Aug 6, 2007 at 12:26 pm
Changing templates does have to be done very carefully. It’s so easy to leave off something that you really need by accident.