Continuing our blog posts about the most important types of web traffic brings us to Direct Traffic. So what is it?

Direct traffic refers to visits to your site that do not come from a known referral source. For example, someone could directly type in your website’s URL into a search bar, or it could be traffic from employees, bookmarked pages, links with no URL tracking parameters, etc. Typically, a visitor to your website comes from a search engine result, like on Google, or from a referral source like social media, advertising, emails, or other websites.

While direct traffic sounds like a good thing, it may be a bit misleading. It may sound like a perfect type of traffic, with people typing in your URL or coming from a bookmark, but in many instances it actually means that those visits have no identifiable source. Under these circumstances, there’s no way to track where visitors are coming from, and you won’t be able to track the efficacy of the referral sources.

Here are some of the types of Direct Traffic:
– Returning customers who have bookmarked the site
– Internal employees
– Campaigns that do not have tracking parameters
– Clicks on mobile apps or desktop software that do not have tracking parameters
– Secure (HTTPS) to non-secure sites (HTTP)

Here are some best practices:
– All marketing avenues and campaigns should include tracking codes, making it easier to track clicks and visits.
– Social Media links should use services like Bitly, which allows you to compress long URLs into shorter links.
– Remove internal IP addresses from reporting, meaning that employee direct traffic won’t be reported.

If you’d like to know more about Direct Traffic, contact 10TH DEGREE by visiting https://www.10thdegree.com/contact/