What Exactly Is Direct Traffic in Google Analytics?
If only all Google Analytics traffic came with one of these.
Direct/none? What is Google Analytics trying to tell me?
Ever log in to your Google Analytics (don’t have it setup? Do that here.) to see where your website traffic is coming from?
It’s one of the most basic (yet powerful) uses of Google Analytics.
(Just check out Standard Reporting – Traffic Sources in your account)
If you have, you’ve see that you can see all sorts of different kinds of traffic sources – like email newsletter campaigns, sites you’ve been mentioned on, PPC traffic, organic search traffic…, and more.
But there’s one particularly puzzling type of traffic that often shows up:
(direct) / (none)
What does (direct) / (none) mean?
It can mean a lot of things – direct/none basically means Google didn’t identify any sort of where-did-this-come-from information attached to the visitor.
This can mean:
- your visitor typed your website address directly into the browser
- your visitor clicked a link to your website inside a PDF
- your visitor clicked the link to your website in your email footer
- your visitor clicked a link inside an email (unless it was from one of your analytics-integrated email marketing service provider campaigns)
- your visitor clicked on a shortened URL (sometimes)
- your visitor has your site bookmarked
- you (or anyone else in your business) has your site has the auto-loading home page (this doesn’t happen if you have your internal traffic properly blocked)
- and a few more code-speak scenarios
That’s a lot of ways people can get to your site without Google knowing where they’re coming from! Of course, we love the traffic, but unmarked traffic makes it hard to know what’s working to get these people to your site.
What to do?
Use a URL tagging tool to generate a tagged link for you wherever possible for the above scenarios. This means your shortened URL should actually shorten the longer tagged link, your email footer should be tagged, any PDF download you have with links back to your site should be tagged, etc.
There’s nothing you can do about bookmarked sites & visitors typing your URL directly into the browser – but that’s OK, those are people who are most likely already familiar with you. (yay brand recognition!)
When you use this tool, you’ll start to see this previously-marked “direct” traffic showing up as email-footer or newsletter-download (or however else you tag your links).
Caution: one thing to avoid with this tool is just copying and pasting the especially long URL and leaving it as-is. Unless you’re using a shortened link tool (like bit.ly), make sure your “display text” for the link is not the super strange-looking long URL and just the text you would’ve put before tagging the URL.
Visitors are less likely to click long unfamiliar links, so err on the side of *not* using the tagged URL if you’re unable to clean up the displayed link. After all, a un-tracked visit is better than no visit at all 
Your Turn
How much direct/none traffic does your site get? Have you ever used a URL tagging tool? Did you find this post useful? Let me know in the comments!
Looking for more on Google Analytics? Try How to Set Up Google Analytics Goals or 19 Things Google Analytics Can Teach You About Your Small Business.
photo credit: chascarper via photo pin cc
I found this quite useful, url tagging is especially helpful.
Thanks
Thanks David! Glad to help
Thanks for your post, was just wondering because most of my traffic comes from direct source
Though reasonably familiar with the English language, I am frequently perplexed by the implied meaning of words used in the context of online activities. For example:
The “URL tagging tool” leads me to a Google page containing a fill-in form:
Website URL? Fine so far. Mine is http://www.yourdailyshakespeare.com
Campaign Medium? Here begins the bafflement. I am not “campaigning” in the strict meaning
of the term – that is I do not send out emails soliciting visits etc. However, should I want to do so, am I to assume that – for example – if I write “email”, I will magically be delivered (via email?) a “tagging tool”? Through which, somehow (?) when I log on to my account on Google Analytics will I be able to discover whether the visitor to my site did so via the soliciting email?
Questions I have are:
** Where and how the “tag”, or its results will show up?
** Will the “tag” be generated by Google according to some lexical algorithm of sorts?
** Will it be delivered to me via email?
** Under the rubric “Helpful information” I am required to use, for example, “utm_medium” to identify the medium used by the visitors to reach my site. It would be nice to know what “utm” stands for, but never mind. Am I then to use “utm_email” in the box marked “Campaign Medium”?
** Could you suggest a source online where questions of such alarming simplicity may be answered, for the sake of the inquiring, block-headed donkeys (today more familiarly referred to as “dummies”)?
Thanks
Nice article, would like to read a bit more on URL tagging though
I think that part with URL tagging is interesting. Didn’t know about that until I read your article.
Hey thanks for this. Was getting a lot of direct traffic I’m suspecting is coming from our emails but can never be too sure. Pointing to this url tagging tool was really helpful.
Cheers,
Jovan
90% of my web traffic is direct/none with a bounce rate of 98% and a time of just 3 seconds. I’ve had no email campaigns in over 6 months.
My site is about surfing so most of my traffic would be coming from CA, HA and FL in the coastal areas. The 90% mentioned above is coming in from NY, VA, CO, IL & TX which normally would be less than 0.02% combined.
Can anyone please advise what might happening to my site?
Hey Scott – hard to say without taking a look. Feel free to message me at http://www.lizlockard.com/contact if you’d like to talk more!
thanks for this info, we get a lot of direct traffic and always wondered how we get it!