New users landing on your ‘thankyou’ page from Organic or Adwords?
Here's a little riddle for those of you who are tech savvy and know their way around Google Analytics. December 2014 I spoke with the CEO of an agency who told me he was seeing new visits directly landing on his clients thankyou pages.
There are a few cases where this could happen:
- People try to order a product, go to their banks' site, wait for more than 30 minutes causing the Google Analytics session to end, pay and return to your site. This will generate a landing on a thankyou page, but from a returning visitor in stead of a new one.
- People have software in place that erases any cookies from a site as soon as people leave them. After returning back from the payment provider they will be seen as a new visitor, but with the source "direct / none" or "bankdomain.tld / referral". So not as "google / organic" or "google / cpc".
Take a look at this screenshot:
How on earth is this possible. It looks like people land directly from the Google search results onto the thankyou page. The facts:
- The thankyou page is not indexed in Google.
- All 10 of those visitors generated an ecommerce transaction, so they where real visitors.
- If their cookies where lost or reset their source would be "direct", so they must have been on the site before.
- I also analyzed date ranges with less than 500k sessions, that will rule out sampling.
According to this table people searched in Google, landed on the thankyou page and immediately purchased a product. Although that would be nice if you own a webshop 😉 it's not right.
Who can shed some light upon this? It seems like there was an update on Google's side, in December I could generate more examples than I could this morning...? Do you see the same strange data when you search for your thankyou page in the Landingpage report?