Bing Search Traffic Declining? You’re Not Alone, It May Be An Analytics Issue.

The webmaster community is buzzing about a steep decline in the organic visits they are seeing coming from Bing Search.

At first we thought it had to do with a Bing Search algorithm update but after a deeper look, it had to do with analytics tools not tracking Bing organic traffic as search traffic but rather referral traffic.

I analyzed dozens of sites within Google Analytics and noticed the same pattern, about 20% declines in Bing Search organic traffic while a huge 200% or so increase in Bing referral traffic to the sites.

Here are four large site profiles I checked, showing week over week changes with organic and referral Bing traffic:

• Organic Bing Traffic Down 20% But Bing Referral Traffic Up 350%
• Organic Bing Traffic Down 5% But Bing Referral Traffic Up 145%
• Organic Bing Traffic Down 10% But Bing Referral Traffic Up 265%
• Organic Bing Traffic Down 22% But Bing Referral Traffic Up 230%

I’ve reached out to both Google and Microsoft yesterday, both are still investigating the issue.

We suspect it has to do with how Bing is sending over the referrer and potentially something changed with that, confusing Google Analytics and other tracking tools.

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