Praveen: SEO, SEM, Online Marketing

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:

1. Emails Marketing campaigns with no referral tracking

2. SEO traffic has no referrals in some analytics tools

3. Traffic from Bookmarks.

4. 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

1. Two different Ads..

2. Impact on other channel due to advertising on this channel and its co-relation

3. Same Ad performing differently in different cities, regions, geographies.

4. 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?

1. 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?

2. 49.37% of Direct Visitors are new visitors. How could this be explained?

3. 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?

4. 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.

Analysis from the above data

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.

1. 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.

 

2. 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.

 

3. Users are finding the blog through blog search engines, blog directories and other blog sites.
   1. They subscribe the RSS feed after which they click on blog posts in RSS Feed.
   2. 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

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