You may have been asking yourself a question that many other business owners have also been asking over the last few weeks..

"Why have my visitors dropped?"

If you have noticed an unexpected.. unusual.. unexplainable drop in your website visitors over the last month – we know why!

With a lot of news circulating around penguins and pandas, you may expect it to be to do with Googles algorithm changes.. However this change by Google is a little different!

What have Google changed?

Google has made some changes to the way that Google Analytics tracks your website, now tracking “www.mydomain.co.uk” separately to “mydomain.co.uk” – this means that if someone visits your site using the www. they are tracked separately to someone not typing in www. at the beginning.

This is because Google Analytics now stores a cookie to the full domain path (whatever is in your web address bar before the .co.uk or .com) which means analytics data is no longer tracked between the www. version and the non-www. version of your website!

How does this affect you?

For example, if your Google analytics account is setup to track www.developandpromote.co.uk but somebody accesses your website through http://developandpromote.co.uk their visit will not be recorded in Google Analytics, to resolve this you can set a preferred domain in your hosting panel. If you would like to find out how this can be fixed, please call our friendly team on 01522 822520 to find out more!

And, if you are a customer of ours, don’t worry as we have already made this change to ensure we monitor your visitors effectively!