Direct traffic makes up an average of 20% of traffic for many retailers, but it is unlikely that 1 in 5 visitors are truly direct. Much direct traffic is actually mislabeled referrals from other sources like search engines, social media, email clients, and dark social platforms. Identifying and cleaning mislabeled direct traffic is important for accurately measuring marketing performance and understanding a brand's true awareness through actual direct visitors. Methods for analyzing direct traffic sources include checking for sudden increases, examining landing pages and URLs, and ensuring all shared links and buttons contain UTM tags to maintain attribution.

1. GA Direct Traffic
Strong Brand Awareness or
Broken Tracking?
Joe Bollard
MeasureCamp Dublin
October 2019

2. Google’s Definition of Direct Traffic
“A session is processed as direct traffic when no information about the
referral source is available, or when the referring source or search term
has been configured to be ignored.”[1]
[1] https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/6205762?hl=en

3. Why Should I Care About Mislabelled Direct
Traffic?
• On average, direct makes up 20% of traffic to retailers websites[2]
Unless you’re a household brand, it’s unlikely 1 in 5 visitors to your website are typing in your domain name and being sent to the site
without going through a search engine.
• Allocation of marketing spend
This creates uncertainty in your ability to attribute revenue to your paid channels making marketing spend allocation more difficult.
• Actual direct traffic is a valuable KPI
By ‘actual’ direct traffic, I mean people typing in your domain name and people accessing your site through saved bookmarks. These are an
excellent indicator of a brands awareness. Other traffic mislabelled as direct can create so much noise that this KPI becomes
misrepresentative.
• Platform misalignment
Your ad platforms, affiliate platforms and email platforms are all displaying a greater number of clicks on an ad than Google Analytics. This
may be caused by referral traffic being binned as direct. Analysing the mislabelling of direct traffic may not mitigate these problems but it
will help you to understand the discrepancy better.
• Growth of direct traffic over time
One of the major sources of mislabelled direct traffic is believed to be Dark Social. Dark Social traffic e.g. WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger
and Slack are growing in popularity as marketing and customer support channels. Future growth of direct traffic increases the need to
understand it better.
[2] https://www.wolfgangdigital.com/kpi-2019/

4. Direct Traffic Breakdown
All Direct Traffic
Actual Direct
Traffic
Type-In
Bookmarks
Website Related
Issues
https -> http
Missing Tracking Code
Broken Redirects
Spam
Spiders
URL Shorteners
Broken/Missing Tagging
QR Codes/PDF’s/Word Docs
3rd Party Platforms Related
Issues
Email Clients
OS/Browser Updates
In-App Browsers
Browser Auto-Complete
Google Discover/AMP
Visitor Behaviour Related
Issues
Dark Social
Browser Plugins
Firewalls
Dark Search
Mislabelled Direct
Note – these lists contain common causes of direct traffic mislabeling
and are not exhaustive.

5. Tips for Identifying &
Retrospectively Cleaning
Mislabelled Direct Traffic

6. Ask the right questions
• Does it make sense that 1 in 5 sessions to your website are direct?
• Did we recently do some significant work on the site? e.g. AMP, GTM migration,
new subdomain. This may be related to a sudden increase in direct traffic
• Does an increase in direct persist over across devices/browsers? If it’s device or
browser related it, some browsers/devices will be effected more than others.
• Does a spike in direct correspond with low session duration and high bounce
rate? If so, the increase in direct traffic may be caused by bots.
• Is your ROAS for paid channels what you’d expect? If ROAS for one of your paid
channels has dropped suddenly, it may be because it’s being mislabelled as
direct.

7. Combatting Dark Social
1. Ensure your share buttons are working:
A functioning, prominent share button functionality will reduce the chances of people
copy and pasting your URL from the browser.
2. Ensure all share buttons have a UTM tag:
If your share buttons don’t contain UTM tags, traffic from dark social will still be
mislabelled as direct.
https://measurecamp.com?utm_source=whatsapp_share
3. Consider creating tags through GTM:
A lot of people delete UTM tags from URL’s before sending them to others. Using a
GTM anchor can make the link shorter and reduce the probability of people deleting it.
https://measurecamp.com#whatsapp

8. Not Recommended!
https://searchengineland.com/60-direct-traffic-actually-seo-195415
In 2014 Groupon delisted their
website from Google Search
Engine for 6 hours to measure
it’s effect on direct traffic. The
drop in direct traffic is significant
and would indicate organic
search was also being
mislabelled as direct.

9. Landing Page Analysis
1. Segment on direct traffic.
2. Set landing page as your primary dimension and landing screen as your secondary dimension
3. Order by number of sessions
4. Examine the landing paths and URL parameters

10. Landing Page Analysis
Things to look out for:
• Sessions landing on the homepage
This is a better estimate of actual direct traffic and a indicator of your brand awareness.
• URL parameters in the landing page path
This may be an indication of traffic from other sources e.g. landing page URL’s with the fbid
parameter may have come from Facebook, parameters containing mc_id may have originally come
from Mail Chimp and similarly parameters awc may have come from Awin.
• Unusually high traffic landing on subdomains pages
This could indicate missing/broken tagging between your main URL and some of your subdomains
e.g. login page or payment page
• Direct mobile traffic to product pages
Dark social traffic is generally (but not always) associated with mobile. Mobile direct traffic to product
pages is a good indicator of people sharing products with others from your website.

11. UTM Tag Everything!
Commonly non-tagged traffic sources:
• Organic post on social media
• QR code on an offline display campaign
• PDF documents
• Email footers
• Slide decks
• Social media ‘about’ sections

12. Thank you!
Joe Bollard
Product Data Manager
Wayflyer
Dublin | London | New York