As marketers, we rely on web analytics platforms like Google Analytics to tell us how people find and interact with our websites.

Generally, this breaks down into before-the-click, which is the sources by which people find you, and after-the-click, which deals with the content they access, the products they purchase and the online enquiries they make.

When you’re looking at before-the-click, Google Analytics is only able to allocate a visitor into one of three categories based on where they came from: Search engines, Referring sites other than search engines and Direct.

It’s that final Direct category that we need to be careful of. Direct Traffic is supposed to be people that type in your website’s address manually or arrive via a bookmark. In face Google Analytics is less discerning who ends up in this pile, lumping all users who did not come from a search engine or referring site as Direct.

Here are three ways you might be over-inflating the count of Direct Visitors in your Google Analytics reporting.

Untagged email marketing

Links from EDMs and newsletters will be interpreted as Direct Traffic unless you’re adding campaign URL tagging to the links. Email platforms like MailChimp will add these automatically, but other systems will require some tinkering.

Links in whitepapers and case study documents

If you’re doing a lot of this type of content marketing, any links embedded in PDF files will need to be tagged manually with tracking info. Use Google’s URL Builder to add tracking parameters.

Missing tracking code on your site

If a visitor accesses a page that, for whatever reason, doesn’t have the tracking code installed then when they move to a page that does have the tracking code installed, Google Analytics will count that as a new visit from Direct. If you think this might be happening, contact your developers or seek an analytics audit.

Keeping on track

It’s always worth checking up on these potential problems with your setup. As a rule of thumb, whenever I first review a site’s Google Analytics, I look for ways that the Direct segment can be reduced in size. Remember that if it’s Direct, we know nothing about it; and that makes accurate marketing analytics almost impossible.

About the Author
Damion Brown is Principal Consultant at Data Runs Deep, a web analytics consulting firm based in Melbourne. He works with organisations to help them find the right mix of digital analytics platforms, then trains internal resources in how to work with and interpret the data. To find out more visit datarunsdeep.com.au.

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