GA traffic drop: double plugin setup?

Very interesting – I was just looking on the forums to see if others had this issue. We had a sharp drop on the same date – August 19th, and it’s been low ever since.

I’m using Google’s webmaster tools to see if I can find anything wrong while checking the code of our site. It’s not like the pages aren’t reporting hits anymore – they all still show hits, but they’ve all fallen significantly.

EDIT: I forgot to mention that we do not use a Google Analytics plugin of any kind, though I am curious if a plugin update caused a conflict. Several plugins were updated around that time on our site.

Bmmoulton, interesting to read you have the same issue. I looked at everything: webmaster console tools, GA debugger, whether it could be a Panda or Penguin penalty but it doesn’t seem to be the issue.

I’m like you, I still have hits recorded but they are really low and in no way similar to the ones on Jetpack.

In addition, Jetpack shows me referral traffic from legitimate sources that are not at all showing on GA.

Let’ see if more emerges on this or if the plugin could possibly have impacted the results.

I can tell you that it isn’t anything with Jetpack because we don’t use that plugin at all.

But how about this for a curve ball – it seems that the simple act of observing this issue has caused our analytics to record properly again.

Screenshot

That was for one particular page that was reporting 0 hits since the 19th. Nothing was changed on the page yesterday. No plugins were installed/uninstalled/updated. The theme wasn’t touched. I changed absolutely nothing on the site between yesterday and today.

The only thing I did do was place a verification file by Google on the server in order to use webmaster tools, but it’s not like one was ever deleted off the server.

No I meant something to do with the Universal Analytics plugin. I mention Jetpack as a useful comparator of the real traffic to the site.

The Google webmaster tool verification file might have had an impact as Google like the console and GA to be linked.

In my case, not much progress.

I did read that people were noticing either a slow roll-out of Panda or a reverse roll-out and many people have seen some sharp drops since about mid-August but no clear answer.

Still looking forward to the answer from this plugin author