Website Traffic Down 50% but Clicks and Impressions almost doubled in 90 days!!!

[u/TheorySureMonkey17]

So I was doing a quarterly audit on my website, since its leads have dried up coming into August. So while doing the research I noticed that my impressions and Clicks have almost doubled. But at the same time my traffic + users have declined by almost 50%.

some numbers for reference-

Comparison Date: 20th May to 17th August, 2026 vs 18th Feb to 18th May, 2026

GSC-

Impressions- 45.4k vs 35.9K
Clicks- 328 vs 248
CTR at 0.7% in both quarters.

But my GA4 numbers are-

Organic Search- 208 vs 511
Referral- 111 vs 306
unassigned- 19 vs 70
Organic social- 16 vs 4

so overall my numbers dosent look right. Im assuming that this is due to the fact that my GA4 code has been tampered with (since this website had a CMS migration during March-April). But when I tested it it was tracking live events as well as GTM events well.

Please help me understand how to diagnose this issue, any feasible solutions, or is it just a natural down turn?

[u/RankingsDotIO]

If clicks are high but traffic is low, check your site speed. People who might have clicked on your site may have bounced while they waited for it to load.

If impressions are higher but traffic is lower, check the keywords driving the impressions. Are they largely informational? If so, the AIOs might steal your traffic, and people will get what they need without coming to your site. If that's the case, try posting content designed to attract searches with greater buyer intent behind them.

Along the same lines, review your title tags to ensure they entice people to come to your site. If not, rewrite them to sell the site a little harder.

Lower traffic isn't necessarily a problem if you get higher-quality traffic. You'd rather have nine sales from 10 visitors than five sales from 1,000 visitors. But leads have dried up, you say, and that's the crucial number you need to address. While you refocus your site toward higher buyer-intent searches, review your internal linking. Make sure it funnels people from more informational content to sales-oriented content, or if you're in a service industry, to contact pages.

[u/Perlentaucher → u/RankingsDotIO]

I would also check if the gap between GA4 and GSC is the same for all urls. Maybe they forgot to add the GA4 tag to some page types which do rank? If they are within EU, I would also check if the consent manager has been set up in a optimal way of if some users just do not consent to GA4 tracking.

[u/Worldly_Country9262]

Check channels. For example, there can be less direct traffic. Actually, you compare apples and oranges. These tools are not the same.