Sales on an ecommerce website that occur in clusters

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

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  Brad Sacks: Has anyone ever noticed sales on an ecommerce website that occur in clusters? I manage a fairly large ecommerce website (magneto) and without anything changing we'll have a very quiet few hours and then all of the sudden MAJOR sales within an hour! It's almost as though Google is turning a switch on and off. Thoughts??? 
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  Micah Fisher-Kirshner: I've seen that happen, usually either due to a recent TV ad or from Google testing out placing the website in a higher position for some important keyword term.
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  Brad Sacks: I definitely think it had to do with Google testing but for how long?? I wish I was able to figure it out. It's been going on for a few months and Christmas season is almost here... 
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  Suraj Gadage: +Brad Sacks ;There are two possibilities:
  
  1. As +Micah Fisher-Kirshner ;mentioned it could be because of your promotional activities (like a video ad, email news letter campaign, social media campaign etc). Usually this happens with Big brands.
  
  However, if think that's not why you see an influx then you can always do a thorough analysis with the data you have collected in the past to identify what day of the week or what hour of the day my customers are more active on the website.
  
  I also work with a large eCommerce website and we always use predictive analytics to determine patterns and predict future outcomes and trends. Based on this we provide specialized recommendations to the customers.
  
  2. Google always drive certain % of real traffic to their sandbox - a place where they experiment new things. But we don't have any clue/idea when and for how long they experiment these things.
  
  Hope this helps!
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  Micah Fisher-Kirshner: Do you have access to Search Console? You could see which keywords or pages is fluctuating/causing those spikes.
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  Dave Elliott: Are you running an adwords campaign? Perhaps one where your not top all the time? Or that isnt running all day?
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  Brad Sacks: We are not running a AdWords campaign, this is all organic traffic. We rank very high for high-volume keywords and some days it just feels as though our listing is removed from search altogether.
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  Dave Elliott: hmmm strange. You obviously seem to have a handle as to when these spurts occur and when the lulls are.
  
  My advice would be to have a look at the SERPs when you next expect to see strange activity.... it might be something like someone else stops running an adwords campaign, which pushes you further up the page. Could be many different things.
  
  I'd also look at the locations of the traffic to see if that offers any clues and also looking to see if social is a contributing factor.
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  Jim Munro: From the expert panel in this weeks SEO Questions hangout on air on 00:29:17 into the YouTube video: https://dumbseoquestions.com/q/sales_on_an_ecommerce_website_that_occur_in_clusters +Brad Sacks
  
  If our assistance with this issue was useful to you, please consider sharing your success story so that others might benefit.
  
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  Brad Sacks: Thanks all. Great comments and suggestions. Still not sure what the reason is...I'm going to have to see what happens for the next 6 weeks (XMAS rush) and hope for the best. Again, thanks for your input.