Recently a JSON-LD for SEO customer emailed about a drop in her traffic which she thought was due to a Pinterest change, but wasn't sure how to check.
My first recommendation is to look in Google Analytics at your traffic by source/medium.
That report will separate out your traffic sources so you can tell if the drop was from Pinterest, Google, or something else. To run that report:
- Go to Google Analytics
- the Acquisition tab -> All Traffic subsection -> Source/Medium
- Expand the date range to the last 12 months and change the report points to by Month instead of Days
- Then you can click on any of the Source/Medium items in the table at the bottom and see if Pinterest or any others took a bit drop
By extending the report to the last 12 months you should be able to spot any seasonal factors, like if your traffic always drops in summer.
This might find the root cause of the problem, or it might not. But it's relatively easy to do and gives you a better idea about what's going on.
If you do spot something, you can start digging into what happened. Maybe you'd like to segment the traffic by page to see if specific pages stopped attracting traffic. Or check relevant blogs to see if there was an algorithm update.
Your next step (or two) will depend on your data and store.
One great optimization is to make sure your product's structured data is setup correctly for Google's Rich Snippets. With those you'll get more traffic and better converting traffic.
You can either audit your store's structured data by hand or install JSON-LD for SEO and have all the structured data you need.
It's already helping a few thousand Shopify stores with their structured data and it could help you too.
Eric Davis