Help finding source of new found traffic

[Chupin]

I've experienced a spike of traffic over the past 3 days, with an overall jump of 3x my normal traffic, and I need to find out where these folks are coming from. Right now all I've got is Google Analytics and the traffic is classified as "Organic Search" (Not Provided).

Chalk it up to a keyword jumping up in the serps and call it a day or is there a way I can get after the data? There isn't a discernible jump in geolocation traffic to help me pinpoint the source of the keyword jump, and serp tracking isn't showing a giant jump either (like page 3 to 1 for a huge source keyword)

 

[Ryuzaki]

SEMRush or Ahrefs might have picked up the keyword that jumped in their position trackers. You could give them a shot.

If you have Google Webmaster Tools installed, that will tell you for sure.

 

[Chupin]

Thanks Ryuzaki, I do have Webmaster Tools and admittedly don't really check it as I've only used it to make sure pages on the site have been indexed and my sitemap is submitted properly. I'll dig into what it has to tell me.

Thanks again.

 

[CCarter]

@Chupin - I heard there was some madmen working on a feature that can showcase increases in rankings with gradual charts like this:

Ideally if you grouped your keywords in segments you'd be able to scroll through them and if you see something like this, you'll know what group of keywords are increasing (or decreasing within the SERPs). But I think these "A-holes" are taking their sweet-ass time bringing this to the masses - or the technology is just not there yet...

 

[Meatplow]

Look at your landing pages, that will narrow it down. Then look at your keywords for that landing page. The majority will be Not Provided, but some will come through. That will give you an idea of the keywords that are sending traffic.

Now, go do a bunch of keyword research on those terms. Throw them all into a rank tracker and see what ranks and what the volume is for each keyword.

You should have a pretty good idea of where everything is coming from at that point.

 

[BigWhite]

Dig deeper into analytics. Check search queries, and also check out refferals. Landing pages as well which was mentioned above me.

 

[Chupin]

Thx for the replies.

I obtained the information u needed from webmaster tools, which has way more information inside than I previously had thought.

I'm still a newbie kinda feeling my way as I go. Since the initial jump I've continued to pull the increased traffic, and it ended up being from a combination of serp jumps and major event happening causing more people to Google the term I'm tanking for.

Thanks to everyone that posted in the thread.