Most of the analysis tool determines the source of traffic depending on the HTTP referrer. When a user browsed from website to website, the HTTP referrer will be recorded, and the analysis tool will find out the visitor’s location and the origin source. For example, if a visitor enters into the website from clicking a link or post on Facebook, the HTTP referrer will determine the source and mark this visitor originates from Facebook.com.
1.Direct Traffic
Direct traffic is defined as visits with no referring websites, the visit which does not require search engines, social media or e-mail marketing. These visitors usually key-in the URL into their web browser or clicks on a bookmark link on their browser. When there is direct traffic growth, analysts will have to dig into the causes to find out the reasons. Here are some common responses.
Internal employees:
Employees usually visits websites and do not have their IP filtered. If precision data is required, company IPs must be filtered out from web analytics.
Customers:
If a customer would log into a customer portal from your website, it is an often reason of direct traffic. In such cases, all of this traffic shouldn’t be filtered out but instead to set up different views to view web analytics without this traffic.
E-mail Traffic:
E-mail traffic often time makes the analytics tool confused. It is organic traffic but has rather determine to be direct traffic. To differentiate this traffic, it could be identified in a spike in direct traffic by analyzing the time a particular e-mail marketing campaign.
Actual Direct Traffic:
An actual direct traffic is a target audience that enters a particular URL into a browser or, by clicking a bookmark page. This shows that the customers has already knew or have interest in the company.
2. Organic Traffic
When an audience visits a website through a search engine such as Google or Yahoo, it is the primary channel that inbound marketing strives to increase. Paid advertisements will not be included as organic traffic, but they are still impacted by paid search or display advertising.
These advertisements are often shown at the top of the search results as a good technique to increase exposure. Organic traffic is more dependent on Search Engine Optimization (SEO). With the right content, SEO and ads, there will be continuous organic traffic growth.
In conclusion, there are some grey areas between direct traffic and organic traffic. The analytic tool cannot determine all of them accurately. Organic traffic will be driven by SEO and paid advertisements; direct traffic will be affected by e-mail marketing campaign and web browsing by internal employees.
Traffic data is a great solution to analyse the result of marketing initiatives and advertisements. Traffic data can also be used to track results and correlate these efforts to actual ROI.