Google analyics direct url pdf#

The majority of your direct traffic should be coming in on your home page. This is going to tell you the pages of your website that the direct traffic is arriving on. Knowing what we know now, what can we do to try and better understand direct traffic? And what steps can we take to try and address this problem and ensure that our website traffic is being attributed properly?Īs a starting point, take a look at your top Landing Pages report for direct traffic only. Perhaps Google Analytics should reclassify “direct” traffic as “we can’t tell where this came from” traffic? So clearly there are many scenarios where users aren’t typing in your URL or using a bookmark but are still be recorded as direct traffic. An experiment performed by Groupon showed that as much as 60% of organic traffic could be coming from organic search.

A users accesses your site from an organic listing.A users clicks a link from a mobile app.A users accesses your website from a shortened URL, like bit.ly.A user clicks on a link from a secured site ( to your non-secured site ( – Which happened to be the case with my Buzzfeed example.

Google analyics direct url pdf#

A users clicks a link from Microsoft Office, a PDF document or any desktop software.

A users clicks a link to you website within Outlook or some other desktop email software.

A users clicks on a saved bookmark that takes them directly to your website.

A users types in your website URL directly.

If Google Analytics is unable to determine where a visitor came from before arriving at your website, then that visitor gets grouped in with direct traffic. Well it turns out that the term “direct traffic” is used pretty loosely within Google Analytics. In other words, the users didn’t arrive at your site by clicking a link on some other website or search engine. Most people assume direct traffic comes from those users who type your website URL in directly or click on a saved bookmark link. After some further analysis, I discovered that all of this Buzzfeed traffic was being reported as direct traffic instead of social or referral traffic as I expected. Yet, the article that was picked up was receiving thousands of visits daily. Much to my surprise, Buzzfeed was nowhere to be found in their traffic sources. Great! Shortly after that article was picked up, I headed over to Google Analytics to watch the traffic pour in. I recently had a client who had some content on their website picked up by Buzzfeed. And while Google Analytics remains an invaluable tool, it doesn’t come without its share of imperfections. I’ve blogged and spoken about Google Analytics quite a bit over the past several years, usually focusing on the amazing reporting and tracking features it offers and how businesses can use it to take their websites and marketing strategies to the next level.