Figuring Out the Source of "direct traffic" by looking at landing page parameters
-
I have a client who runs an e-commerce website, and I noticed that 40% of his traffic and 25% of his sales are all attributable to Direct Traffic. At first, I tried to solve this problem by tagging all of the previously untagged links in his e-newsletter, which I expect to be very helpful.
However, then I looked at the landing pages for his direct traffic, and I see that it is almost entirely filled with thousands of unique URLs that begin with a question mark followed by the name of his e-newsletter or shopping cart vendor. It would be the equivalent of having a url like the following: "www.willmarlow.com/?constantcontact=keya;sldkfjsdlfkjdf;sldkjf"
If we have this amount of information in the link, shouldn't there be a way to add additional parameters to the URL to move this traffic out of the Direct column? Has anyone encountered this before? Thanks.
-
Sure hope you can fix that
-
Thanks to both of you. These are very helpful answers - I'll let you know how this works out! I think you are both right.
-
Sounds like the buyer is leaving the website to make a payment then coming back, which would be a direct visit. You said " shopping cart vendor". When someone goes to make a payment, do they leave the site?
-
Hi Will, I imagine you (or your client) will have full control on the email vendor. In that case you may ask them to add to each link the utm tags which will help GA to recognize correctly that traffic.
My recommendation is to add to each link the following:
- utm_source=newsletter
- utm_medium=email
- utm_campaign=(the_month_you_sent_the_newsletter)
- utm_content=(the portion of the ad where the click so you can see which parts of the ad performs the best)
That would be enough, but you still have the utm_term available where you can insert any other thing you may want to track.
Hope this helps!
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Change Phone Number Based on Traffic Source + Ping URL for Call Tracking Number
Hi Everyone, Is there a tool that can change the phone number on a web page based on the visitor source (i.e., direct, organic, paid, etc.)? I'd like to implement a solution like this with different call tracking numbers based on the visitor source. We use the Google suite for our analytics (GA, GTM, Google Data Studio, Google Optimize is also an option as well). - Also, is there a good call tracking service that will ping a URL each time the phone number is called so that we can track these calls as events in GA? The majority of our visitors use a desktop PC and dial in the number on the screen rather than clicking (tapping) on it from a mobile device. Thanks, Andy
Reporting & Analytics | | AndyRCWRCM0 -
Moz Crawl shows over 100 times more pages than my site has?
The latest crawl stats are attached. My site has just over 300 pages? Wondering what I have done wrong? RRv3fR0
Reporting & Analytics | | Billboard20120 -
How long does Google Analytics credit a source?
I was under the impression that GA credits the source with a conversion if it is the source for the current session but it seems that if the user returns later that the source may still be credited. Is this the case? How long does GA credit a source?
Reporting & Analytics | | bearpaw1 -
How to see organic traffic only?
Im having trouble separating our organic traffic vs our PPC. When I go into Analytics>Traffic>Sources>Search>Organic, its giving me numbers that are not accurate. I believe whats happening is that its not able to distinguish our bing organic/ppc. Is using Webmaster tools Search Queries a more accurate way to determine organic search volume?
Reporting & Analytics | | DemiGR0 -
800,000 pages blocked by robots...
We made some mods to our robots.txt file. Added in many php and html pages that should not have been indexed. Well, not sure what happened or if there was some type of dynamic conflict with our CMS and one of these pages, but in a few weeks we checked webmaster tools and to our great surprise and dismay, the number of blocked pages we had by robots.txt was up to about 800,000 pages out of the 900,000 or so we have indexed. 1. So, first question is, has anyone experienced this before? I removed the files from robots.txt and the number of blocked files has still been climbing. Changed the robots.txt file on the 27th. It is the 29th and the new robots.txt file has been downloaded, but the blocked pages count has been rising in spite of it. 2. I understand that even if a page is blocked by robots.txt, it still shows up in the index, but does anyone know how the blocked page affects the ranking? i.e. while it might still show up even though it has been blocked will google show it at a lower rank because it was blocked by robots.txt? Our current robots.txt just says: User-agent: *
Reporting & Analytics | | TheCraig
Disallow: Sitemap: oursitemap Any thoughts? Thanks! Craig0 -
Has anyone experienced Google Analytics track the page visit to a "thank you" page, but not the goal conversion?
Has anyone experienced where Google Analytics would track the page visit to a "thank you" page, but not the goal conversion that should result? The goal had worked for a long time as it is as just a goal url with head match. No funnel. Not case sensitive. For about four days now, no conversions have been recorded, but Google Analytics shows hundreds of people visited the page that should trigger the goal. Additionally, we have received the hundreds of leads. A Screaming Frog search shows the code is embedded throughout the site. For the interested, the GA code looks like (and the 8 Xs are the correct number on the site): Am I missing something?
Reporting & Analytics | | 352inc0 -
Page Speed - What tool to use?
I am looking for a good tool to measure page speed. Any tools out there that you recommend?
Reporting & Analytics | | rmontanez0