60% of Direct traffic is actually Organic
-
For some pre-reading, Groupon experimented with deindexing part of their site back in 2014 and found that they had a big drop in direct traffic: http://searchengineland.com/60-direct-traffic-actually-seo-195415
Recently I've conducted a similar test on a very large site and have found that Direct dropped somewhere between 50-80% for the pages deindexed, depending on the day (It has been running for ~4 days).
Has anyone else tried this experiment before? If so what were your results?
What I'm most interested in now is to find out why this traffic is classed as Direct - there appears to be no reason why the site or server would interfere, so I can only imagine that Google is sending traffic without referrer data. Does anyone have any thoughts as to why they would do that? -
I can't say that I have, but maybe you would like to write a Youmoz post about your research I think it would get a good deal of attention!
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
-
Need help understanding what happened to our organic search.
I help run an ecommerce business that mainly runs on Google organic search (yes, I realize this is not a good place to be). Last April, we saw around 25-30% of our organic search cut. I’m pretty sure it was due to the mobile update but we had some changes in the past month or two before that. I’m looking for someone to review my analytics account and see what happened. Possibly this is called an audit? Also, we’re looking to ask some questions about long term strategy as we are thinking about a redesign and switching to a new platform. Maybe more content? Maybe more social?
Reporting & Analytics | | kirbyf0 -
Can you arrange Google Analytics source/medium traffic by percentage change?
I'm doing a year to year traffic audit for a client. I would like to analyze Google Analytics source/medium traffic by percent change. Is there a way to do this? Do I have to create a custom variable? 9BH70RO
Reporting & Analytics | | VanguardCommunications0 -
Traffic drop after analytics troubles
Hi For two weeks we had an artifical low bouncerate & high pageviews/visit in our Analytics reporting. The day we corrected the bug in Analytics - our bouncerate & pageviews/visit returned to normal levels - however we saw our search traffic go down massively(-50% in sessions). The bug in the Analytics was caused by a second Analytics tag which was included in an external script which interfered with our own tag. The drop in traffic occurred just after the removal of the second script (which was only on our site for two weeks). We didn't touch our own tagging - and there were no technical changes on the site during this period, and there is no seasonal trend which could explain the sudden drop of traffic. We double checked our tagging - and the analytics tag is present & working on all the pages of our site. On the organic traffic report from analytics you can clearly see the when the troubles with analytics started & ended (artificial low bounce rate) - and that the traffic drop starts right after the reporting issue ended. Webmastertools also indicated a lower number of views/clicks, but not to the massive 50% drop. Is it possible that Google uses the measurements from Analytics for it's SERP's? Or should there be another reason, and where should we start looking? Appreciate your help! e5GmoMM
Reporting & Analytics | | DirkC0 -
More Traffic From Lower Rankings?
I have access to analytics for two different sites that rank for the same keyword. Strangely, the site that ranks on page 3 gets three times as much traffic as the site that ranks on page 1 (rankings according to multiple SEO tools as well as my own browser). How is this possible?
Reporting & Analytics | | JABacchetta0 -
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.
Reporting & Analytics | | williammarlow0 -
Getting Traffic for an Unranked Phrase
Over the last month, 40% of a client's search traffic as resulted from a phrase that they are not even ranking for in the top 100; nor are they popping up on PPC ads for it. How is this happening? I feel like I am missing something very obvious.
Reporting & Analytics | | ScriptiLabs0 -
What extra shall we do to increase organic traffic for both the sites?
One of my clients has english language websites targeted for USA and UK audience with some content variations but60%-70% of the content on site remains the same. The site is hosted in USA. One is hosted on brandname.co.uk and one is on brandname.com. The precuations that we have already taken to save it from being marked duplicates are: 1. used rel=alternate element for all product detail pages2. currency in both the sites are different that is GBP and USD3. have tried to differenttate the product by using different product specific terms like Publishing Year: vis a vis published in:Author Vis a vis Written byFormat vis a vis binding type Add to cart vis a vis add to basket and so on What remains the same: 1. Title structure 2. Description 3. Product Name 4. About the product text
Reporting & Analytics | | CyrilWilson0 -
Campaign shows no traffic from Analytics
My campaaigns are connected to GA but traffic is zero for all campaigns
Reporting & Analytics | | berndheyer0