A portion of “Direct” traffic reported in Google Analytics is really from Organic Search…
Well, actually a large percentage of it is really from search – as much as 60%! That’s a pretty big margin of error.
“Direct” is supposed to mean that someone typed in the URL, came from a saved bookmark or maybe even email. Unfortunately, Google Analytics lists just about anything that it cant quite identify the source as being “Direct” rather than saying “unknown” or something more fitting.
Keep that in mind when you are looking at which channels are bringing in the traffic and conversions.
Experiment Shows Up To 60% Of “Direct” Traffic Is Actually Organic Search
“Everyone knows that browsers don’t always report where visitors came from when they arrive at a website. When they don’t report where they were in the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) referrer header, often the traffic is considered “Direct” — which really means, “we have no clue where they came from, maybe they typed the URL…”
