The traffic a website recieves throughout the year, of course, will never be the same. The traffic that your website recieves depends on many factors, with the main being SEO and the type of content you are publishing. For example, a tech blog will have booms in traffic around new tech releases as well as Christmas, where people are researching good tech products to buy as presents. On the other hand, as website such as I own, PoemAnalysis.com, will gain most of its traffic between September through to June, which is the typical time that schools are open and researching analysing poetry (and also when most people are at a computer station).

For this reason, a drop in traffic can usually be explained with lots of logical reasoning behind it.

For the vast majority of websites, August will, no doubt, be the worse months for traffic. Therefore, if you are panicking about a drop in traffic for August, do not worry! It is typical that traffic dwindles in August because:

• This is the month where people go on holiday the most and are away from the internet.
• Summer tends to discourage people to stay online, since there are more things people can do when the weather is nicer.
• Financially, many people struggle with the finances of August, which reduces the amount they spend, which reduces the amount advertisers spend out on advertising etc. the knock on affect, ultimately, results in a drop of traffic to websites.

With this, if you find that your traffic does not start to pick up towards mid-September, that is potentially when you should start worrying. However, until that point, it is completely normal to have an unexpected drop in traffic for August.

This concurrs with the thoughts of Ezoic about a drop in revenue per thousand visitors for advertising units. It is common for August to also be the worst month for websites generating revenue from the likes of PPC advertising, because of the following reasons:

• Brand budget cycles
• Advertising season changes

What can you do?

To be honest, you can’t do much to prepare for or reduce the effect of a traffic drop, even if you know about it coming such as you would do when August comes round.

However, this is in terms of SEO organic traffic drop to your website. For this reason, you might be inclined to try to counteract the drop of organic traffic through pumping resources into increasing other sources of traffic, such as social media and email marketing.

Therefore, it is not all doom and gloom. August is a paritcularly tight month for the majority of people and there are no exceptions to this for websites!