Huge drop in mobile visitors?

[Mike McGee]

I experienced a huge drop in traffic to my dsSearchAgent Mobile, which seems to have happened precisely on October 8th of 2011, and has not recovered since.

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Did anyone else experience this?

[amattie]

Our internal numbers definitely show a drop in page views, pages per visit, and bounce rate on that date. Oddly enough, the number of visits / unique visitors didn't change at all. For what it's worth, we didn't make any changes to our products on or around that date.

We saw the numbers return to previous levels immediately after Christmas.

[Mike McGee]

Strange. Mine still hasn't recovered. My overall site numbers are up substantially in recent months, but mobile is still down. Not sure why.

[Mike McGee]

Andrew, didn't dsIDXpress listing detail pages used to automatically forward to the mobile version for mobile visitors? That's not happening now. If that's the case, that would certainly explain the precipitous drop in mobile visitors.

[amattie]

No, we never automatically redirected visitors visiting dsIDXpress pages. We were concerned that suddenly injecting our redirect JavaScript into our clients' websites could cause headaches. We'll probably do that in the next version of dsIDXpress though.

It's certainly plausible that if you did have the redirect JavaScript in there before and then removed it, you'd see a drop in visitors. The remedy is easy though. Just hop into your control panel, go to "Mobile", copy out the redirect / prompt code, and place it in your theme as appropriate. If you don't have that code on your site because you don't want the prompt to show up on every page, you may need to create custom results / details templates, add the script code into those files, and then change the appropriate results / details template options to use those new templates.

Hope that helps.

[Mike McGee]

I just checked, and I DO have the redirect script in the page template I use for my dsIDXpress pages. However, I see the script I have installed is different than the one provided in the control panel. I guess I'm using an old one? Swapped it out and now it's working again. I guess that explains it!

[amattie]

Hm, weird. We haven't ever had a "broken" version of the script code in our dashboard as far as I'm aware and so I'm not sure what happened there.

Our redirect code is smart enough to figure out what type of page the visitor is on and redirect them appropriately. Results page visits will be redirected to the results view in the mobile IDX (subject to the filtering issues we've been talking about), and detail page views will be redirected to that same property in the mobile IDX.

[Mike McGee]

Yeah, it's working now, except for on custom links based on a polygon shape. I know they fixed some stuff on dsSearchAgent for polygons. (The email updates weren't respecting polygons, but now they are.) But the mobile redirect is still not respecting polygons. Hopefully that will get fixed soon.

Thanks,
Mike

[Mike McGee]

Lost SE rankings?

Nope, only affected mobile.

[aaronsold]

LOL Mike... you missed that Mary is a spammer. See the ms pacman game reference?