Organic traffic dropped. What did it do to your revenue?

Fewer visitors from Google only matters as much as those visitors used to buy. Before rewriting pages, find out how much of your revenue came from search, and which pages carried it.

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Drawn with made-up numbers.

What to check, in this order

  1. 1Confirm it in Google's own Search Console: clicks for the same weeks, so you know it is Google and not your tracking.
  2. 2Find when it began, to the day. A sharp step points to an update or a change on your site; a slow slide points to competitors or the season.
  3. 3See how much of your revenue came from visitors who first arrived from Google. If it was a tenth, this is a traffic worry; if it was half, it is a sales one.
  4. 4Look at which pages lost the most visitors from Google. Often two or three pages carried most of it.
  5. 5Check those pages still work: still published, still indexable, not redirected, and still the page you meant people to land on.

Where Sumly shows it

  • Visitors from Google, week by week, next to new customers and revenue.
  • Revenue by source: what the people who first came from Google paid, so you know what the drop costs.
  • Click Google on the Sources list to see only the pages its visitors landed on, this period against the last.

Why revenue falls later than traffic

A visitor from Google today may buy next week. And people who already pay keep renewing. So revenue usually falls a week or two behind the traffic, and less steeply, which can hide how much new business stopped.

Watch new customers rather than revenue for the first month. They follow traffic closely.

Mistakes that make it lie

  • Counting all of Google as one source of sales. Brand searches, people looking for you by name, rarely fall; the pages that lose are usually the ones that brought new people.
  • Rewriting every page at once. Start with the two or three that carried most of the visits that paid.
  • Judging the loss by visitors. A page with many visitors and no buyers costs little when it falls.

Organic traffic questions

Is it a Google update or something on my site?

Compare the date with Google's list of announced updates on its Search Status Dashboard, and with your own releases that week. Many pages falling on one day lean towards the update; one page falling leans towards that page.

How do I know what the traffic was worth?

From the visitors who first came from Google and later paid. Sumly keeps the source of each buyer's first visit, so their payments add up under Google.

Should I wait it out?

Google's own guidance is that recovery can take months, sometimes until the next core update. Meanwhile, fix what is clearly wrong and look for sales that do not depend on search.

Read next

Why are my sales down? Revenue attribution: money traced to the visit that started it UTM parameters: links that say where a visit came from

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