Google Analytics - Direct Traffic

The Direct Traffic report is fairly straightforward. Most often this is a "nice to know" statistic, and in most cases it's not directly actionable. It really just tells you how many visitors arrived at your site directly - either by typing in the URL in the address bar, or perhaps clicking on a bookmark that they've created. In other words, no site is responsible for referring them to your site; there is no apparent point of origin. The report screen looks like this:

• Number of direct visits (and percentage of total)
• The average time on site
• Bounce rate
• Pages/visit
• Percent new visits

Really, most of the stats here require some further segmentation or interpretation to mean anything.

For example, with a newer website, you should expect a larger percentage of direct traffic than referral traffic. This will also be the case with companies that have stronger brand than content.  However, in the case of a newer website, you can use this report to trend over time, to measure the effectiveness of SEO and linking campaigns that may be taking place. If your number of direct traffic declines over time while your overall traffic does not, then that's a good indication of effective linking and search-friendly content.

Also, you can use segmentation to determine the effectiveness of your online and offline marketing campaigns. You'd need to set up campaign tracking (as will be detailed in the Campaigns tutorial). Then you could use this screen - segmented by campaign - to compare the relative performance of offline campaigns such as print or radio ads. I say offline, because the visitor would have read or heard your URL, and then typed it into the browser address bar.  Any online campaigns would be tracked elsewhere.

So, as you can see, there's not a whole lot to the Google Analytics direct traffic report.  But perhaps you've found some incredibly powerful or useful way to use this report. If so, please leave a comment below with your tip!