Universal Analytics: Why does Google Organic appear as Direct traffic?
-
Hi there,
When I enter the site via Google Search and follow myself via Real-Time Analytics I appear an organic visitor (which is good). When I browse and visit the site I still am an organic visitor. However, as soon as I fill in the contact form (gravity forms) and land on the "thank you page" I appear as a direct visitor with Google as the source. Since I have the thank you page set-up as a goal, Analytics incorrectly attributes these conversions to the direct medium instead of the organic medium. The tracking code has been installed on all the pages and all conversions are being recorded. What is going on?
-
The form is probably obscuring your history and making you look like a new visitor with no attributable origin.
-
Are you sure that the source is Google and the medium is direct in this case? That sounds really strange as it could be that somewhere the redirect is using UTM tags. Normally the source would be empty if the medium is direct.
-
I think it may be down to the headers which are being passed by the browser when the form is submitted. Could it be that the third party plugin from gravity forms, performs a funny post and redirect when the submission is made. This will then return the visitor as direct as opposed to organic.
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
-
Google Analytics not Working on all pages despite many attempts
Hey gang, So this problem has been going on for months. None of our landing pages track, but all of our blog pages do. I've tried GA plugins, (we are on wordpress) and just now even put the code in the theme header script. Still to no avail. I just checked right now, and the blog pages have the global GA code, but now I noticed not even the home page has the code! Could it be something to do with my theme? I tried to pay a guy on upwork to fix but he couldn't fix it either. Thank you for you help!
Reporting & Analytics | | Meier0 -
Google Analytics, Wordpress, Sumo - who to trust
Something is wrong. I have a website that according to Google Analytics gets zero relevant clicks, with most of the clicks it does get coming from Russia. Wordpress says it gets a hundred or so visitors a month, with most traffic going to the pages that I know rank. Sumo says the heat map got 76 clicks. How would you figure out what's really going on?
Reporting & Analytics | | julie-getonthemap0 -
Google Analytics - Dashboard Question
I'm looking to set up a dashboard widget in Google Analytics that does the following but can't : Shows traffic sources in a table as the dimension, and wanting to show goal completions to a specific product page and then only show what the average time spent (by source) on just those product pages. It looks like it's showing the whole session duration for the entire source, but I want to create a secondary filter that is only showing the time spent on those specific pages. Can anyone help - or is this possible? Thanks all!
Reporting & Analytics | | ReunionMarketing0 -
Organic Traffic From...Mountain View, CA?
I've noticed something a little odd in my organic search traffic lately. Looking at several websites that target the Minneapolis area, I'm seeing some organic searches come in (typically using head keywords - no geo-modifier) from Mountain View, CA. There's no way we are truly ranking well on these terms in California, so it certainly feels like Google sniffing around. I was worried that perhaps they were checking into penalizing us or something, but we've actually seen upticks in search traffic lately. This traffic is not showing up in Google Analytics, just Adobe SiteCatalyst. In the past, spikes from random locations were probably some sort of crawler, like the preview bot, but these are coming in as searches with (for now) keyword data. Has anyone else seen anything like this?
Reporting & Analytics | | SarahLK0 -
Does anyone know what's happened to google analytics -> traffic sources -> SEO -> queries many of my accounts are showing a drop to zero in the laste few days
Howdy mozzers It's in the question title really. Zero impressions showing for the last few days on. Multiple accounts Any thought out there
Reporting & Analytics | | Big_Partnership0 -
Direct traffic
Our web site is thefutonshop.com. we have seen a spike then a drop off in direct traffic and dont know how to figure out why in analyitics. Ithe drop off is all on our index page.
Reporting & Analytics | | FUTONSHOP0 -
Track banner ad with google analytics
Hi We have a top banner ad on an external renown site only to attrack traffic. It does show up in google analytics, but i have seen some increase in (direct) / (none) traffic. Is there anyway i can track it when banner is showed from 2 separate URLs http://www.tv2torget.no/bedrift/netthandel/ and http://www.tv2torget.no/bedrift/netthandel/barneklaer/ Thanks Dan Lærum
Reporting & Analytics | | danlae0