Drop in paid traffic does not match the date of stopping the campaigns

Reports and working with data
1

I noticed a huge drop in my paid traffic statistics from Saturday 10 May 2025 to Sunday 11 May 2025.
We had indeed campaigns running and we stopped a big-budget campaign, but only on 15 May 2025.
So the drop in my statistics comes 4 days too soon.
I cannot drill down other causes, no changes made in any configurations whatsoever, nothing in the change log…

Any ideas?

PaidTraffic_drop
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2

Hello @Dexville

Can you send me website adress? I can take a look and check what seems to be the issue.

3

Dear Jakub,

Thx for your reply.
Can I share this somewhere in a private window/mode?

rgrds,

4

@Dexville
You can send me more information in private message. Click on my name and you should find Message button there.

5

@Dexville Is it possible that your team has implemented some cookie consent changes around 11 may? Your Piwik PRO Tag Manager works only if you accept cookies and that might have influence on how much data you are collecting.

We also have available way to integrate with your cookie consent provider:

You could load Piwik PRO Tag Manager every time, and then decide which tags to load based on user consent in tag manager itself.

6

Dear Jakub,

We do not use the built-in Piwik PRO cookie banner, we use Cookiebot instead.
No changes were made there either.
We use that configuration on other sites as well and we haven’t noticed any abnormal behaviour there.

On the contrary: in our Cookiebot logs, we even see an increase in consents around that period, doesn’t make sense.

And again: I checked the audit log in our Piwik PRO account: no changes in configuration or tags.

Just did another check in debug: allowing or refusing certain categories of cookies shows perfect behaviour.

Or do you suggest we do this: Cookiebot integration | Piwik PRO help center?
We did it for another client (because we are using Piwik PRO’s CDP there).
But it still doesn’t explain the suddend drop from one day to the next (during a week-end) or why all our other websites don’t encounter this issue.

7

Looking at the data I don’t see how the drop could be related to stopping campaign. Most of the traffic is from campaigns - that’s why you see changes there. If you check other sources drop is similar. As you said, there are no changes in tag manager so something must have happened somewhere else.

Because of how Piwik PRO Tag Manager is implemented I suspect it must be something related to either consent manager changes or some development on your website. There are few errors in console, could you check with developers if anything could be related to tracking or did they change anything around 10th May?

I posted wrong link above, it should have been link to Cookie bot integration. :slight_smile: If you decide to use Cookiebot integration, and Piwik PRO Tag Manager will load with website every time then you could consider also anonymous tracking:

8

Thx Jakub,

I’ll have to check with my colleagues then from development.
I suspect some kind of auto-update of a WordPress plugin.

9

Dear Jakub,

Update.

My colleague-developers weren’t able to deal with the errors in the console so I tried something else.

Usually, we install the Piwik PRO-tracking code manually.
So what I did here (since it’s a WordPress-site): I threw the manual code out and used the WordPress-plugin instead.
And this clearly is generating an uptick (but still way below what is was) - see attachment.

Now, this raises more questions.

  • How can this change cause such a dramatic effect? If I look in the code, it only moves up the tracking code in the body a little bit (now sits right above the second part of the Google Tag Manager trackingode in the . Are there other mechanisms in the WordPress plugin under the hood? Usually, we only use plugin for e-commerce sites. For non-ecommerce WordPress-sites, we use the manual installation to minimize the use of plugins.
  • For non-WordPress websites, we also use the manual installation. Here and there we use an installation via Google Tag Manager (template). But we stumbled upon issues here in the past too (didn’t work).
  • So how do we know now what metrics are correct? Again: this is the only change we’ve made since the website went live.

grtz,

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10

@Dexville I think your new setup might not be using your cookie consent banner correctly, and that’s why you are seeing increased traffic. You can verify it with Piwik PRO Tag Manager debugger view.