Gene McKenna wrote an interesting article on Search Engine Land, that referenced an experiment that showed up to 60 % of direct traffic was actually organic search. In testing with default browser settings, they found differences based on whether someone performed a search at Google directly vs. in a browser’s search box.
From the article:
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 in or hit a bookmark.”
We’ve all lived through changes that have impacted Direct traffic as recorded by our analytics programs. Remember back in September 2012, when iOS 6 was released and suddenly lots of sites lost organic search traffic but gained an equal amount of direct?
And let’s not forget when Apple fixed it in July 2013, and the shift from Organic to Direct largely corrected itself within about a week.
Not to mention Google’s shift to encrypted search, making “not provided” a household phrase, within search circles, anyway.
Read the full article here
Interesting article.
It’s very important to realize that they’re only examining very long URLs. And who expects much direct traffic for something like the following anyway?
http://www.thedomains.com/2014/07/09/experiment-shows-up-to-60-of-direct-traffic-is-really-organic-search/#comments
People will type in TheDomains.com. But not a lengthy URL.
Here are 2 quotes from the author of that article:
“[We’ve only examined pages] with a ‘long’ URL, like http://www.groupon.com/local/san-francisco/restaurants. We define long as being at least in a sub-folder, so this excludes the home page and top level folders like /coupons, /getaways, etc. (We excluded these “short” URLs because those are pages that actually do get a fair amount of Direct traffic — on the homepage, Direct really is Direct.)”
And he also says in the comments:
“We see when the urls are short, like for the homepage, the % of Direct that changed during this experiment was tiny. This make sense, users do type short urls like groupon.com into their browser’s address bar.”
Direct Navigation To Consumers Rescue ? Google Conspiring to Control ?
jeff schneider Independent Marketing Analyst/Strategist at UseBiz.com / (.COM ) URL Centric Marketing
History demonstrates very clearly that consumers given true choice prefer actual choices not cattle shute platforms that inhibit their own creative choices such as search engines. Rebellion is coming soon and for good reason. Consumers crave a platform that involves their active participation in the creative process involved with their web experience destinations of choice!
Gratefully, Jeff Schneider (Contact Group) (Metal Tiger)
sure Jeff, rebellion is coming soon. keep the dream alive.
meanwhile, i’ll continue typing misspelled words into google on my phone with my fat fingers and having them direct me to the correct spot. so will everyone else.
…or maybe your idea of remembering a bajillion websites and constantly landing on parked pages will really take off. i dont know because im not a metal tiger, only a plastic cat.
meow
Hello Ray
Where are you getting your analytics?
Gratefully Jeff Schneider (Contact Group) (Metal Tiger)
Analytics for what we did not conduct the experiment the person quoted in the article did, the link at the bottom takes you to the whole story.
the title itself reads as an Oxymoron:
“Experiment Shows Up to 60 % of Direct Traffic is Really Organic Search”