The Difference Between Direct and Organic Website Traffic

Other: Traffic that doesn’t fit into any of the other sources or has been marked as “Other” in a URL parameter will be put into the “Other” traffic bucket.

Now that we know how all web traffic sources work in general, let’s look more closely at the most important ones: direct and organic traffic.

Direct Traffic

Direct traffic is made up of visits that don’t come from another website. When a visitor goes from one website to another by clicking on a link, the first website is called the referrer. These sites can be search engines, social media, blogs, or other sites that have links to other sites. Visits that don’t come from a referring URL are counted as “direct traffic.”

We used to think that this traffic came from people typing in the website’s URL or clicking on a link they had saved. Today, however, the story behind direct traffic is a bit more complicated, and many websites, especially those with growing organic traffic, seem to be getting more visits from direct traffic.

In 2014, Groupon did a test in which it took its site off the index for six hours to see how much direct traffic it got. When Groupon did this, it was able to figure out that 60% of its direct traffic was actually organic traffic because when it de-indexed its site and stopped organic traffic, its direct traffic also went down.

Why are more sites seeing an increase in direct traffic, and what should you do?

Let’s look at the most common reasons for direct traffic to find out.

People who type your URL into their browser or use a bookmark to find you are considered direct traffic. There’s nothing you can do to find out more about this, so just accept that people know your brand.

Employees who work for you:
Your employees often visit your site, and their IP addresses are not blocked from web analytics. As a general rule, web analytics should filter out the IP addresses of all company employees.

Customers:
Does your site have a place where customers can log in? This is usually to blame when it comes to direct traffic. In this case, you don’t want to completely filter out the traffic. Instead, you should set up different views in Google Analytics to see web analytics without this traffic.

Emails from certain email clients:
Email clicks from Outlook or Thunderbird typically don’t pass on information about where the click came from. If you look at the traffic around the time an email was sent, you can usually tell if it caused a spike in direct traffic.

Mobile traffic 

Safe (https) versus unsafe (http) sites:
Since Google started talking about how important it is to have a secure site, more websites are now hosted securely, which is shown by the “https” in their URLs. But according to the security protocol, referral information will not be sent from a secure site to a non-secure site. You can fix this by adding a third-party SSL certificate to your site to make it more secure.

Several Experts in web analytics say that about 20 percent of your website’s traffic should come from direct links. But because of significant changes on the web that make it hard for marketers to figure out where traffic really comes from, this number is likely to go up. What about natural traffic?