# Significant Drop in Anonymous Traffic March 2020

**URL:** https://meta.discourse.org/t/significant-drop-in-anonymous-traffic-march-2020/172915
**Category:** Data & reporting
**Created:** [December 10, 2020, 8:04pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/significant-drop-in-anonymous-traffic-march-2020/172915 "2020-12-10T20:04:16Z")
**Posts on this page:** 5
**Page:** 1

<div class="post-metadata">

### Author: ![ked](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/ked/32/64837_2.png) [@ked](https://meta.discourse.org/u/ked)
#### Post date: [December 10, 2020, 8:04pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/significant-drop-in-anonymous-traffic-march-2020/172915/1 "2020-12-10T20:04:16Z")

</div>

A 1 yr. lookback report on Anonymous users revealed this:

 ![image](https://global.discourse-cdn.com/meta/original/3X/f/e/fe6854d5874499f60af6887dd4242a8be4cfb7f1.png)

I suspect the spike at July 31st will always be a mystery, but clearly something happened in the March 13-20 week. Anyone else experience something similar? Any ideas on root cause? We’ve done nothing with respect to marketing, hosting, etc. Business as usual except for this.

(our site has nothing to do with health, coved etc.)

---

<div class="post-metadata">

### Author: ![omarfilip](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/omarfilip/32/208019_2.png) [@omarfilip](https://meta.discourse.org/u/omarfilip)
#### Post date: [December 10, 2020, 8:10pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/significant-drop-in-anonymous-traffic-march-2020/172915/2 "2020-12-10T20:10:04Z")

</div>

Can you check your stats (Google Analytics) to see where the majority of pre-March 22 traffic was coming from? Perhaps a crawler? Bing comes to mind.

[https://meta.discourse.org/search?expanded=true&q=bing%20bot](https://meta.discourse.org/search?expanded=true&q=bing%20bot)

---

<div class="post-metadata">

### Author: ![ked](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/ked/32/64837_2.png) [@ked](https://meta.discourse.org/u/ked)
#### Post date: [December 10, 2020, 8:15pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/significant-drop-in-anonymous-traffic-march-2020/172915/3 "2020-12-10T20:15:06Z")

</div>

Here’s Bing (only) from Jan 1 till now:

 ![image](https://global.discourse-cdn.com/meta/original/3X/d/3/d354b9edc2154bb1f4022ba93a6bf99ed8aedc95.png)

Here’s Google (only) same time period:

 ![image](https://global.discourse-cdn.com/meta/original/3X/3/f/3f059c48c92c1565a0493ac1f70a248282634a63.png)

---

<div class="post-metadata">

### Author: ![omarfilip](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/omarfilip/32/208019_2.png) [@omarfilip](https://meta.discourse.org/u/omarfilip)
#### Post date: [December 10, 2020, 9:58pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/significant-drop-in-anonymous-traffic-march-2020/172915/4 "2020-12-10T21:58:15Z")

</div>

Looks like a drop of about 40% in crawler users for Bing and similar for Google corresponding to the same time in your first graph. How do the pageviews per crawler look here `/admin/reports/page_view_crawler_reqs`?

---

<div class="post-metadata">

### Author: ![asirota](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/asirota/32/197298_2.png) [@asirota](https://meta.discourse.org/u/asirota)
#### Post date: [December 10, 2020, 10:03pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/significant-drop-in-anonymous-traffic-march-2020/172915/5 "2020-12-10T22:03:30Z")

</div>

Can you break out by country?