I’ve recently switched from using GA to Matomo to track traffic and conversions on a clients website, but I’m getting an unusually high amount traffic and conversions coming from direct traffic referrals. Organic and paid traffic are about the same as previous levels recorded in GA, but direct traffic is double what it has been previously, plus its accounting for over half of all conversions (sales) recorded. However, the total number of conversions from all channels matches our sales records, so there is at least some real traffic there.
I’ve looked through the other discussions on this forum about people with similar issues with high direct traffic, as well as suggested steps in the troubleshooting documentation. I still haven’t found an explanation that seems to fit my situation, this is what I have been able to ruled out so far:
- not a http to https issue- I checked the server traffic logs and while we do have a http to https redirect in place, there’s very little traffic to our http domain anymore, not enough to account for this.
- It’s not bot traffic because it wouldn’t account for any conversions
- Its not diverting a significant amount of traffic from organic and paid that I can see, I still have GA setup and the traffic numbers for organic and paid are about the same.
4)DoNotTrack visitors- if it were this there would be less overall traffic, not more. - It not a glitch that’s double reporting existing traffic, as I would think that would also increase the total number of conversions recorded too
- The tracking code appears to be properly installed on all site pages, if this were the issue I would think the paid and organic numbers wouldn’t match up to what we are getting in GA
- We don’t have any large email campaigns or anything like that would explain a sudden increase in direct traffic and sales
Any suggestions for what other steps I could take to try to identify the problem? Any help would be greatly appreciated.