How much direct traffic is really direct?
-
Does anyone else think that a large chunk of traffic labelled as "Direct" in your analytics isn't direct at all. When you analyse traffic trends it seems that a large percentage could just be browsers with their referring URL hidden so it only appears direct. Here's the evidence:
-
When we've been affected by major search algorithm changes, we've seen big changes in direct traffic as well as organic, but not in referral traffic.
-
If direct traffic is just bookmarks, typed-in URLs, and people clicking through from emails why is direct traffic 85% new visitors? We don't do any offline advertising, so you'd expect genuine direct traffic to be returning visitors -- either our brand loyalists or subscribers to our email newsletters.
-
If you segment direct traffic into new and returning visitors and look at a major algo update as discussed in 1), you find all the drop in direct traffic is from New Direct visitors, with no drop at all in Returning Direct visitors.
Can anyone explain who these New, Direct visitors are if not simply mislabelled new, search visitors. Cookie deletion can't be the problem (ie: they can't be Returning, Direct really) because the traffic doesn't behave like returning, direct (that is, it varies too much).
I'd be really interest to hear theories, and whether anyone has any figures on the extent of HTTP referrer blocking.
-
-
We get a lot of brand searches, but even if they come from unrecognised search engines you'd expect them to be registered as referrals not direct, wouldn't you?
-
I have thought the same thing before but, then again it could be true. Do you have high number of searches for your business name? I've also thought that maybe Google can't track it because its coming from another search engine. I also get a pretty high number of not provided keyword searches. Hopefully someone will answer this question for the both of us!
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Big drop in organic traffic after moving the website-should we still do 301 redirects?
Hi,
Reporting & Analytics | | martin1970
We have a website that got redesigned with new urls in Jan 31, 2018. Since then our SEO traffic has gone down big time and to never recover. We did not do any 301 redirects back then (very stupid I know but I was not in charge then). So my question is would it be beneficial to 301 redirect old urls that were once ranked but now have all 404 errors or is it too late to do these 301 to gain any benefits? If a page that was once ranked and then have a 404 error, how long does google keep that 404 page in their database? I have heard information saying that although the page is a 404 it may still be indexed in their backend for some time and then it completely drops off all together. If so do you know how long time they would keep those 404 in their database? The old urls may have had good backlinks pointed to them because the organic traffic was good back then. So I wonder if doing 301 right now would help send some link juice over to the new urls? Or would this be a complete waste of time? Cheers Martin1 -
Spike in Direct visits with Drop in Google Organic Visits
Does anyone have an explanation for why Google organic visits plummeted while direct visits rose the same amount. Total visits have been very normal. jI1Bn2B,UuzONNK kepV0eu
Reporting & Analytics | | phogan0 -
Re-classifying a Traffic Source in Google Analytics
Hey All, I think it's inside of the Admin section of Google Analytics, right now I have a traffic source from the domain of indeed.ca that is being classified as Organic traffic when it should be classified as referring traffic, how can I tell Google Analytics that all traffic from this source should be classified as referral traffic and not organic traffic? Furthermore, after I make this change, will Google Analytics re-classify my past data so I can do a proper analysis? I can't remember how to do this and any help would be appreciated! Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | EvansHunt1 -
Does this traffic drop look like Penguin to you?
Dear Community In early October, I noticed a sharp drop of the rankings of the main KW of a website I manage: idee-sol.fr. This, of course I immediatelly attributed to penguin 2.1. While researching on the experience other webmasters have had with this unfortunate situation, I noticed that most of them had very sharp drops of traffic in a relatively small time, e.g.: a drop of 80% in a couple of days. But on idee-sol, the drop looks less steep yet equally worrying. Was the cause of this traffic/ranking drop due to penguin 2.1 exclusively or to penguin + something else (or not penguin at all?) I'm including an image of the "non paid search" report of analytics. dPnphnr
Reporting & Analytics | | Masoko-T0 -
Loss of Google referral traffic after server move / CMS move
I have a client that changed from MoveableType to Wordpress. He also changed from a dedicated server to WP Engine. He may have blocked search engines for a week or two, so his organic traffic is down but only by 25%. He's 301 redirecting all of the old pages. The mystery is that his referral traffic from Google is down 90%. It's a popular blog, so that's thousands. It's been going on a month now. Anyone seen this before?
Reporting & Analytics | | Hyper-Dog0 -
Turkish Invasion? Massive influx of non-english traffic
Last month, a client of mine has had a very large increase in irrelevant traffic. This traffic is all being sent by Google from mostly eastern Europe, but also from Egypt and Brazil. The largest influx is from Turkey. The traffic is all landing on only two URL's. The magnitude of this traffic is about 350 visits per day. The main keywords sending traffic are: müzik indirme programları (Turkish which translates to "music download programs") تحميل برنامج اوبرا (Arabic translates to "download Opera") program za skidanje muzike (Bosnian for "program for downloading music") My client is a small nonprofit summer music festival (with a strong emphasis on Opera music) so some of the on-page at least relates to these keywords. But the site is entirely in English. Since the words are related to a traditional sketchy vertical I'm worried that my client site has been hacked. Though, for the life of me, I can't imagine what anyone can gain from this. My questions are: Does anyone have any idea what is going on? What are the potential ramifications of this irrelevant traffic? (I'm worried about the traffic slowing down the site, I'm also worried that 350 visits per day and a 95% bounce rate is going to hurt my clients reputation with search engines) What can be done about it? Thank you for any insight you can provide.
Reporting & Analytics | | JesseCWalker0 -
What extra shall we do to increase organic traffic for both the sites?
One of my clients has english language websites targeted for USA and UK audience with some content variations but60%-70% of the content on site remains the same. The site is hosted in USA. One is hosted on brandname.co.uk and one is on brandname.com. The precuations that we have already taken to save it from being marked duplicates are: 1. used rel=alternate element for all product detail pages2. currency in both the sites are different that is GBP and USD3. have tried to differenttate the product by using different product specific terms like Publishing Year: vis a vis published in:Author Vis a vis Written byFormat vis a vis binding type Add to cart vis a vis add to basket and so on What remains the same: 1. Title structure 2. Description 3. Product Name 4. About the product text
Reporting & Analytics | | CyrilWilson0 -
Google News traffic spike mystery; referring URLs all blank, Omniture tags didn't fire.
Our content is occasionally featured in Google News. We recently have had two episodes where this happened, but (a) nearly all the referring URLs were blank, and (b) our backend logs show 3-4x more requests for the article in question than Omniture does. In other words, hundreds of thousands of visitors requested a URL from our site (as proven by the traffic logs), but don't seem to have come from Google News (because HTTP_REFERER was blank), and didn't execute the onpage javascript tag to notify Omniture of the pageview. Perhaps this has nothing to do with Google News, but it is too strong a coincidence that the two times we were on there recently, the same thing happened: big backend traffic spike that is not seen by Omniture. It is as if Google News causes browsers to pre-fetch our article without executing the javascript on the page. And without sending a referring URL. Has anyone else seen anything like this before? Stats from the recent episode:
Reporting & Analytics | | mcglynn
- 835,000 HTTP requests for the article URL (logged by our servers) - these requests came from 280,000 distinct IP addresses (70% US) - the #1 referring URL is blank. This accounts for 99.4% of requests. Which, in itself, is hard to believe. These people had to come from somewhere. I believe browsers don't pass HTTP_REFERER when you click from an SSL page to a non-SSL page, but I think Google News doesn't bounce users to SSL by default.That said, we do see other content pages with 70-90% blank referring URLs. Rarely 99+% though.0