What Is Direct Traffic?

Date First Published: 4th August 2022

Topic: Web Design & Development

Subtopic: SEO

Article Type: Computer Terms & Definitions

Difficulty: Medium

Difficulty Level: 4/10

CONTENTS

Is Direct Traffic A Good Or Bad Sign?
Is Direct Traffic A Ranking Factor?

Learn more about what direct traffic is in this article.

Direct traffic is defined as traffic with no referring website or source. This could include visitors manually typing the URL into their web browser, clicking on a link that they have bookmarked, or clicking on links in non-web sources, such as apps, software, and offline documents. The traffic does not come through search engines or a link from another website.

Direct traffic is completely different from organic traffic, which describes free traffic that comes through search engines, such as Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Yahoo, and Yandex. Organic traffic comes as a result of SEO efforts. The biggest difference between organic traffic and direct traffic is that it is unknown where direct traffic visitors have come from, what caused them to visit, and how that data could be used to improve marketing efforts. In organic traffic, all of that is known.

Note:

Applications, such as Google Analytics can give a measure of direct website traffic as a percentage. Google Analytics separates traffic that comes directly without any referring website or source from paid ads, referral sites, and search engines. Direct traffic can be found under the acquisition section by clicking all traffic and then channels.

Is Direct Traffic A Good Or Bad Sign?

Websites should have a good balance of both direct and organic traffic. Ideally, the amount of direct traffic should not be higher than 25%.

High amounts of direct traffic can be a good sign for the following reasons:

It might mean that people know about a website and have bookmarked it to come back to it later. In order to increase the popularity of a website, it is also important for it to have at least some direct traffic.
People are finding the website in ways other than on search engines. If users are manually typing the URL, it will indicate that they are already familiar with the company name and do not need to use a search engine to find it.

On the other hand, high amounts of direct traffic can be a bad sign for the following reasons:

The website may be incorrectly configured - If a website uses HTTP instead of HTTPS with no SSL certificate and a user clicks on a HTTPS link, which redirects to a non-secure HTTP one, the source of referral traffic will never be identified or passed on and it will be labelled as direct traffic. This will happen every time someone goes from a secure (HTTPS) webpage to a non-secure (HTTP) one.
The website may be difficult to find online and people are finding it through offline methods, such as printed documents or PDF files.
The tracking code may be broken or missing on some pages. For example, if a visitor browsed a page that did not include the Google Analytics code and clicked on a hyperlink to a page that did include it, Google Analytics will be unable to track where the user has come from and will mark it as direct traffic.

Is Direct Traffic A Ranking Factor?

A lot of people think that the more direct traffic a website gets, the higher it will rank on Google and other search engines. Direct traffic is not a ranking factor. Similar to bounce rate, search engines have no way of measuring the direct traffic of a website since this would require them to measure the traffic of a website, which they cannot measure unless the website has analytics code on the page that is linked to a service owned by them. Google does not look at Google Analytics direct traffic data to rank pages.

Direct traffic is also quite easy to manipulate and difficult to verify. For example, during a cyberattack called a DDoS attack where an attacker floods a server with so much malicious traffic that it cannot operate, that website would receive much more direct traffic. It would be easy for someone to manipulate the search engine results so that a specific search result gets moved up by them constantly making requests to a website if direct traffic was a ranking factor. Be wary of any studies that link direct traffic with search engine rankings.