Direct traffic is that traffic which has no referrals recorded by your analytics tracking system, therefore there are certain factors which directly or indirectly impact Direct traffic to your site: Direct traffic is generally considered as the type in traffic, Traffic due by BRAND VALUE, they are users who are influenced by TV, Radio, and Print Ads. These users reach your website by typing the URL in the address bar. This is not entirely true, as any traffic which is not tracked (has no referrals) are considered as direct traffic:
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Emails Marketing campaigns with no referral tracking
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SEO traffic has no referrals in some analytics tools
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Traffic from Bookmarks.
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A Viral Marketing Campaign
People who take advantage of direct traffic:
Domain name purchasers, typosquatters, cybersquatters whose intention is to purchase a domain name with typo mistake of popular brand, hence hoping to generate traffic. For more information please visit SEOmoz
Affiliate Marketers, Adsense money makers whose main intention is to make money through arbitrage.
Tracking Direct Traffic
Tracking Radio Ads and offline advertising internally: Some advertisers advertise their brand in Radio and give out the URL such as “http://radio.example.com” which is 301 redirected to URL “http://www.example.com/xyz.php?trackingcode=number”. This way the impact of advertising on the channel can be tracked. This will help in comparing the effectiveness between
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Two different Ads..
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Impact on other channel due to advertising on this channel and its co-relation
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Same Ad performing differently in different cities, regions, geographies.
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You could further extend to record Page Views, Time on Site and other details..
Google has launched tracking of Adwords audio campaigns in Google Analytics..
Below is an Interesting Example of my blog: The search engine traffic, referral traffic to my blog can be easily analyzed and explained as they are fairly straightforward. SEO, Referral traffic analysis requires no expert, even a layman can understand if they look at Google Analytics Report. However, the interesting part is the Direct Traffic Analysis, which initially I failed to understand until a few months back, hence I have decided to share this analysis in this Direct Traffic post.
Traffic Details
Traffic Share – Medium Wise
Direct Traffic User Details
What can we analyze from the given data?
What Google Analytics says?
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13.97% of users are direct, how are they finding my blog even though there is no offline Ads, no TV Ads, no Radio Ads whatsoever?
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49.37% of Direct Visitors are new visitors. How could this be explained?
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Blog has 80.38% bounce rate (for direct visitors) which is high Can we figure out where the problem lies? What is wrong with the site?
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Average Time by Direct Visitor is 41 seconds. This is a time taken for glancing a webpage, not even reading it.
This means half my direct visitors are new, they glance the page in 41 seconds and most of them leave without doing anything. Not sure how they are finding my site. They mostly visit 1 page of my site and bounce off the site like it was yuck.
Google Analytics does not give any details apart from the above.
The direct users are landing on inner pages of the site. Its very unlikely they are typing the entire URL in the address bar…These Direct Users must be from RSS feeds, bookmarks.
Another data to look at is number of comments.. I get about 12-15 comments in a day most of which are junk and some genuine ones.
- Users could be clicking on blog posts on their RSS feeds and land on specific page.. They then read and/or post a comment and leave the page.
This is the reason for bounce rate being so high. The users read the blog post and leave; hence bounce rate is not relevant figure to look at.
- Users visit one page and leave, therefore the Average time spent calculated is wrong. Google can only track time correctly if users visit more than one page.The reason being that when a new page is requested from the server then the log files records the time at which the new page was requested from server by the same user.The difference in time at which the page 1 was requested and page 2 was requested is calculated as time spent on the site. So, consider a example when a single page was requested then time spent by user on that page is cannot be determined. Hence average time here is the time spent on site by the users who browsed more than 1 page divided by the total number of users who visited the page.
- Users are finding the blog through blog search engines, blog directories and other blog sites.
- They subscribe the RSS feed after which they click on blog posts in RSS Feed.
- Users may be finding the site through Book-marking sites, Social media sites add it to their own bookmarks, where users directly find the link to inner page of the site.
Direct Traffic is the most targeted traffic, as these visitors really read the content on your website.
Most returning visitors return through Direct Traffic, especially when you are not advertising offline. They are ideally the best source for returning visitors, hence business can sell their content easily.
This Article is Originally found at praveenkodur.com
Copyright @ 2007 Praveenkodur.com
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[...] Praveen wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerpt Direct traffic is that traffic which has no referrals recorded by your analytics tracking system, therefore there are certain factors which directly or indirectly impact Direct traffic to your site: Direct traffic is generally considered as the type in traffic, Traffic due by BRAND VALUE, they are users who are influenced by TV, Radio, and Print Ads. These users reach your website by typing the URL in the address bar. This is not entirely true, as any traffic which is not tracked (has no referr [...]
Online marketing is an interesting field, here everything can be tracked back to the click made…
Analyzing direct traffic is the easiest in terms of quality as there is not much data on it..
Direct Traffic, Web Traffic Analysis, Direct Web Traffic Google Analytics…
Direct traffic is generally considered as the type in traffic, Traffic due by BRAND VALUE, they are users who are influenced by TV, Radio, and Print Ads. These users reach your website by typing the URL in the address bar….
RSS feeds does generate a good traffic.. also , the RSS feeds are used in mashups will help in SEO and traffic…
[...] by TV, Radio, and Print Ads. These users reach your website by typing the URL in the address bar.http://www.praveenkodur.com/blog/2008/03/direct-traffic/YouTube – Goo Goo Dolls – IrisGoo goo Dolls – Iris. Hello, you either have JavaScript …var [...]
Direct Traffic for a website can be analyzed to a certain level of accuracy..
Zachary…
Good site….very good info on Direct Traffic
AdSense Money Maker…
Do you know how to make money from AdSense automatically? You don’t!? I’ll teach you how!…
Direct traffic also comes from email marketing campaigns, RSS, bookmarks etc..
website traffic…
Genenerating traffic is very easy, however generating quality traffic is very difficult…
There is huge demand of affiliate marketing these days, people are doing everything to promote affiliate networks.. however it is not easy option to give affiliate links everywhere and make money easily..
Does anyone know of a good article spinning script. Looking to take my articles and PLR articles and spin them.
Steven Walsh
I too was experiencing the same situation presently.
direct tv…
Many blogs have stopped using trackbacks because dealing with spam became too burdensome. This enables authors to keep track of who…
thank you for sharing nice information
yeah i am also thankfull to the webmaster for sharing his knowledge here .
online marketing or making money online is said to be an easy task but there are some problem regarding this workm as i am doing it from last six month. One should aware about disreputable organization before joining any such organization. Idea about spam should be very clear because that i think the most important part of this MMO.
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Rogers
Generating traffic online can be done in number of ways , but what about spam free and problem free traffic generating method. To generate traffic online one should follow the related rules. Any post to for the above related theory would be highly appriciate.
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Rogers
Hey ryan!!!
Thanks for such a wonderfull and interesting comment. Its really knowledgefull to read your views.
Keep helping
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Alex
Hi Praveen,
excellent info about SEO.Thank q very much for giving such wonderful info for us.
We can find more info about SEO through my site
Keep updateing info…:-)
Vijay simhareddy
Hyderabad
Really this information are too good !!!
,..] http://www.praveenkodur.com is another interesting source on this subject,..]
what a great site and informative posts, I will add a backlink and bookmark your site. Keep up the good work!
I’m Out!
Nice post mate
Hi just thought i would tell you something.. This is twice now i’ve landed on your blog in the last 2 weeks hunting for completely unrelated things. Spooky or what?
Although article marketing is fundamentally free to do, it’s definitely a great idea to buy automation tools. Article spinning and submitter softwares are the best ones you can acquire that are going to massively facilitate you leverage your article marketing campaigns.
Article marketing is really great if you have the time and effort to make new articles each day.-;;
Thanks for sharing these data and some tips too. There are a lot of strategies in regards to direct traffic such as article marketing, backlinks, RSS feeds and even blog commenting.
when you want to promote your webiste or product, article marketing is always the best way to do it.”.~
Thanks for an informative article. The online marketing industry is always evolving and hopefully we will have better tools soon. It would be great to be able to really analyze the “Direct Traffic” as this will show you which of your advertising Dollars are worth your spend. Anyway, keep up the good work.
This is really some cool info you have here. Traffic analysis is really important so one will know where to target his marketing efforts. 13.97% direct traffic with 49.37% new visitors is pretty high if you ask me. Maybe it’s caused by people who personally recommend your site url to friends, colleagues, etc. This post you shared here is pretty astonishing. Many thanks and more power to you!
Pretty good post. I just stumbled upon your blog and wanted to say that I have really enjoyed reading your blog posts. Any way I’ll be subscribing to your feed and I hope you post again soon.
I really like this particular matter, Quite possibly to web marketing/SEO. Have you ever heard from meetup.com? I find we now have generally several decent possibilities to satisfy and netwoork with others there. It is best that you have a look at it in case you get period.
so far the best thing that you can do to market some stuffs is article marketing. it is very effective in reaching potential customers -;’
excellent info about SEO.Thank q very much for giving such wonderful info for us.
We can find more info about SEO through my site