Sharp increase in sessions and orders - trying to figure out why

[thegeargods]

Hi all,

So this is a good problem to have, of course - around 3 PM yesterday my site activity jumped to about triple the normal level. Previously, on a good day I would get maybe 40 orders, and maybe 1500 sessions. Yesterday I got 78 orders off 4500 sessions. Normally I have 2-8 people on the site at a time according to the Live View - yesterday I had 30-40 people for a sustained period of several hours.  It seems to have slowed down somewhat today, though I am not sure how much as Sunday morning is slower in general.

I cannot figure out what has caused this sharp increase. Based on Google Analytics the traffic is coming from Facebook, but it is not from my Facebook ads, which do not show an unusual number of conversions for yesterday. So it has to be organic traffic from Facebook, I guess. I did not post anything to Facebook yesterday, and when I do I get maybe 10 link clicks. My only theory was that someone with a lot of followers saw a post and shared it, but I looked at my shares from yesterday and that does not seem to be the situation. I don't even know which specific Facebook post this traffic is coming from, though I can narrow it down - based on the landing page that is getting the large traffic increase, it has to be a post linking to that product.

Any ideas? Has anyone experienced this before?

Thanks 

[Samco]

Hi,

It happened for me few times in the past when there was an article in the news about our business, 

maybe someone posted a "20 best dresses for 2019" on a leading Facebook page?

• Try to maybe check google analytics at Acquisition -> all traffic -> source/medium and select the second dimention to "shared url" could maybe give you a hint to what link was shared.
• Is the location/gender/other segmentation of the buyers/traffic changed during that time? that could suggest a direction
• Try to check Google Trends https://trends.google.com/trends to see if maybe there was something that happened that increased the demand of your product and somehow they all went to Facebook and google but you didn't saw it on google because you used all your daily budget and SEO is well SEO...

Interesting...

Good luck finding it let us know what it was 🙂

Sam

[thegeargods]

Thanks for the reply!

I tried looking at the shared url and it was just the product url of the product that is getting all the extra traffic.

I also did a little more digging in the Insights section of my Facebook page and the only thing that stood out was that there was a large spike in video views yesterday. Now I only have a couple of posts with a significant amount of video views, and only one that links to this product. So someone sharing that post would explain it - the only thing is that it does not look like anyone shared that post anytime recently. And also the post itself only has like 2k reach, but the video in that post has over 10k views, which is strange in itself. Maybe someone embedded that video in a different Facebook post or something? I actually once had a competitor copy my video, so that's not impossible, but if it was a competitor why would they leave in the link to my store?

So still wondering, but it appears that the spike is connected to that video somehow.

[Samco]

If it wasn't shared recently than another option for you to still see the views on that video is that the video post was embeded in an Ad, if that post was shared from your page or if it existed in other page before you shared it in yours.

Is there anyone else who manages your page? 

btw, it could have been shared a while ago and only now someone created an ad with it or generated traffic to his Facebook page where it was shared.

Good luck 🙂

Sam