Noticed a drop in traffic this month? Here’s why
The online marketing landscape is ever-changing. Over the last few years, there have been several changes to rules and regulations when it comes to recording and reporting website traffic. The biggest change has been in the introduction of cookies.
Cookies – what are they and why are they important?
Cookies are small files that are downloaded to a user’s computer when they visit a website. These cookies are implemented onto websites to remember a user’s preferences and record data.
Websites often display a cookie policy (either as a panel, banner or pop-up) as soon as a visitor enters the site, immediately giving users the option to consent. This gives users more control over their personal data and allows them to decide whether a business can track their behaviour and link it to their identity. Failure to comply with cookies breaks GDPR rules and could result in a fine of up to 4% of your business’s annual turnover.
Cookies also have a big influence on how website traffic is measured and recorded in Google Analytics.
We use Google Analytics to track and report your website performance including how many website visitors you’ve received, where these users came from (whether it was from organic search results, paid ads, social etc), how long they stayed on the site and what pages they’ve visited. Google Analytics uses cookies to generate all that data. If a visitor ignores or chooses to deny the cookies, Google is lawfully unable to identify the user or monitor these actions.
What does this mean for your website and traffic?
From July 1st 2023, all old Google Analytics accounts will be sunsetted and stop recording data. In preparation for this change, we’ve started the migration to Google Analytics 4 (GA4) and made changes to our cookie policy to work alongside GA4.
Due to this change, you may see a drop in traffic in your latest report. On average we’ve seen a drop between 30-40%, but it’s important to note that this drop is only in visible traffic. It is highly likely that users are still clicking through to your website and browsing but aren’t accepting the cookie policy. For many of our affected clients, we’ve noticed no change in their rankings or contact form conversion rates.
But we’re not stopping here. At Dental Design, we’re continuously optimising our service and working closely with Google to ensure your reporting is as accurate as possible. We’ve updated our cookie policy to work with Google’s “consent mode” which uses machine learning to predict users’ behaviour even if they’ve declined cookies. This behavioural modelling method takes time however as it uses accepted cookie data to form its algorithm. Over the next few months, you should start seeing “consent mode” beginning to work and increases in traffic. We’ll also be testing multiple cookie policy designs and interfaces that make it harder for users to ignore cookies whilst still following ICO’s compliance rules.
More information about cookies can be found on the ICO’s website. We’ve also written some helpful blogs on the migration to GA4 nd other changes to SEO in 2023, but our dental marketing experts are always here to answer any questions.
Get in touch by giving us a call on 01202 677277.
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