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We launched a new website in March this year and site traffic has been fairly consistent, however, since the beginning of September I noticed a huge drop off in traffic, all of which seems to be direct.

Digging in to this a little further in Google Analytics it showed that the drop-off in traffic has come from two countries - the US (50% reduction) and Germany (almost 100% reduction), and it appears to be that for the US the loss in visits were direct to the home page (23,000 down to 10,000), whilst for Germany they were direct to our press page (bizarrely getting approx. 4,000 visits a month just from Germany to this page compared to a handful from the rest of the world), and bouncing immediately without visiting another page.

All other channels have remained at a consistent traffic level, just direct affected.

I'm guessing there must have been some kind of bot that was causing this but I'm being asked to report on positive trends since the new website launched and want to be able to caveat what's caused this almost overnight changed (2nd September from US and 24th September from Germany) so wondering if anyone knows of an event that may have caused this or a way that I could find out what's happened.

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    Sure sounds like some robots to me. It's also typically complex to solve...sounds like you already may have. We need to verify it. For these visits, what did the behavior metrics look like?
    – Mike Ciffone
    Commented Oct 14, 2021 at 16:37
  • Look at the IP addresses of the German visitors...
    – Harper - Reinstate Monica
    Commented Oct 17, 2021 at 0:47
  • @MikeCiffone out of almost 15,000 visits to the press page (the German visits) they were 99.93% direct traffic landing on that page and 99.7% bounce rate, the weird thing is there isn't a specific spike, there was roughly 80 visits a day like that from February to July when it jumped up to around 130 visits a day for a month, then overnight back down to 80 visits a day for a few more weeks and then overnight just disappeared to zero
    – Trevor Clissold
    Commented Oct 19, 2021 at 8:52
  • @TrevorClissold I think that the answer is simply that it was a bot. So the concern here is performance since the new site launch, yeah? How are other metrics looking besides just traffic? I would look at £ coming in.
    – Mike Ciffone
    Commented Oct 20, 2021 at 22:41

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