Hello,
Since January 1st, 2025, we’ve observed a sharp and sudden drop in the number of visits attributed to the “Direct” source in our Matomo instance.
Before that date, we had stable levels of Direct traffic (over 20,000 visits/day), and on January 1st, the volume dropped by more than half and has remained low since. This change has significantly impacted our overall traffic figures.
Here’s a screenshot of the trend:
We have not made any major changes to our site’s tracking code or campaign tagging on that date. This leads us to believe either:
- A Matomo update or change in attribution logic may have occurred,
- Or there’s a technical misconfiguration we haven’t identified.
Has anyone experienced something similar around that period?
Are there known issues or configuration changes we should investigate?
Thank you in advance for your help!
Hello Damien,
I didn’t notice any drop in other Matomo’s instance.
Did you notice any other increase in traffic somewhere else?
sudden drop we’ve observed in our traffic reports starting January 1st, 2025, specifically related to Direct traffic.
According to our data in Matomo, the number of visits attributed to the “Direct” source dropped significantly on that day and has remained at a much lower level ever since. This shift has had a visible impact on our overall traffic volume, with no compensation in other sources such as Organic, Referral, or Paid.
Hey Damien,
we had this kind of sharp drops on at least 3 websites. However it occured at different dates in 2024.It happened mainly in August/September 2024.
Were you able to find a culprit for this behaviour? The websites stay constantly on this lower levels since these drops. We also didn’t change anything that we can see related to Matomo and the tracking is still working at the lower leves, so I think about changes from ‘outside’. Maybe changes with DNT from Browser or something like this?
Best regards,
Lex
Good morning,
We are having a similar case where visits have been declining at Knowler in recent months.
Nothing has been changed in the configuration or in Matomo. Could you please indicate what the problem might be?
Screenshot is attached.
Thank you and best regards.
Good morning,
Has anyone been able to read my comment and can tell me what I could do or how to proceed please?
Thank you very much in advance and best regards.
