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You may have seen ‘Direct’ traffic in your web analytics and are wondering what that means. How can traffic be direct?
Direct traffic originally meant, that someone had typed the URL into their browser. Thus visiting the page ‘directly’. This would also be the same for if someone bookmarked a URL.
However, often direct traffic means that your analytics system has been unable to detect the source of the traffic. So it is classified as direct traffic.
Different causes of direct traffic:
- Often direct traffic is referred to as ‘type in traffic’ or ‘bookmark traffic’.
- Where someone goes direct to the website from a bookmark or typing the domain in.
- Mobile usage, or app usage can drive direct traffic up too.
- Where someone clicks a link, and it opens your website/content in an internal browser, or swaps from the app through to the website.
- In this process of swapping apps, often the ‘source’ where they come from is not passed through. Which is why direct traffic is generally going up.
- In some cases, browsers are removing UTM parameters or other parameters which may help classify the traffic.
Over time, the rate of ‘direct traffic’ can appear to go up, and that’s because people are discovering your website & content through a number of different means.
How do web analytics detect traffic sources?
Analytics detect traffic sources by the browser telling them where someone came from. When the browser is unable to do that, it is then classified as direct.
Technically, when you click a link, a little packet goes out to the web server and says hey, this person is requesting this page, can you send it please. And so it does. In this transaction, it often shares where you came from.
How can you reduce this uncategorized traffic?
Ways to address these gaps in your analytics can be to append parameters to your URLs, to help communicate that, oh this was shared in a certain place. And that will reduce the amount of direct traffic.
These tactics are not bulletproof, as that URL can still be shared in other places. But it at least gives you some directionality or idea of the original source. And is a suitable solution for most use cases.
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