Facing Glitches In Google Analytics Organic & Direct Traffic

Hello all,

I am facing some glitches in the source and medium report (Direct & Organic traffic)

-My organic traffic suddenly down
-My direct traffic suddenly increased
-Ranking of all keywords are still stable (no drop in ranking)
-No issue was detected on the website while checking from the search console
-No manual action was detected (search console)
-No big google algorithm takes place last week
-Huge difference between search console & analytics data (Last week clicks shown by search console is 1468 and analytics showed only 535 organic users)
-I have only updated the WordPress theme last week
-No other updation was done on the website
-Checked the analytics code also and it seems good

So what may be the possible reason for this issue and how will I fix this issue

You're not alone. Many are facing this issue too. I've also brought this up several times here.

Rankings are as normal, if not, improved. Yet, traffic fell and GSC is shows organic traffic has fallen 30-50%. This further confirms the suspicion when impressions are still as normal or higher than before, but clicks have fallen.
Your direct traffic increases may be due to Google bot or scrappers/crawlers/spambots. Be wary of that. It has happened to me.

Other reasons I suspect could be causing the traffic anomaly.

1) Seasonal traffic depending on the period/months.

2) Google has been tweaking ad listings and search results' layout. You can read more at SEroundtable. Here are a few links:
https://www.seroundtable.com/google-double-site-name-url-in-snippets-32940.htmlhttps://www.seroundtable.com/google-large-sitelinks-in-search-ads-32914.htmlhttps://www.seroundtable.com/google-test-curved-green-visible-ad-label-32908.html
There have been many changes to the UI's search results for this month. Google is constantly testing many things that we may not be aware of. All these will definitely affect your site's CTRs in search results. So even if you rank first, but if google makes the layout so attention-distracting, your traffic will definitely get affected. Since last year or so, when Google starts rewriting organic search results' title and description instead of following what webmaster's have written, it has impacted traffic. And who doesn't get affected? Paid ad listings! Because advertisers can still write relatively attention-grabbing titles and descriptions. Thus, more clicks for them (and more revenue for Google). COINCIDENTALLY, Google has been reporting new-highs in ad revenue. Just search for it and you will see.

3) Last, but not least, as brought up by another BHW member, there's a conspiracy theory that Google is intentionally throttling traffic. I've also witnessed this personally. Traffic would be normal in the morning, but afternoon or night time it becomes very quiet or very, very little traffic. The next day, the whole morning is quiet, but traffic starts coming in on the afternoon, then at night quiet again. Etc.


As you can see, many external factors could be causing our poor traffic. Even if we rank first, traffic would still be heavily impacted if Google starts messing with the search results UI.