Alistair Lattimore originally shared:
Reminder, Most Direct Traffic Isn`t Actually Direct
After The Atlantic first published their research into dark social 1 in 2012, I`m surprised that anyone else is surprised that the massive amount of direct traffic that sites gets - even when accounting for social - still isn`t a reflection of direct traffic.
If you`re looking to get a better grasp on the impacts of this for your website, LunaMetrics have a cool plugin for Google Analytics named DirectMonster 2 that makes every effort to re-attribute this `direct` traffic into a better source by propagating the traffic source data of the person that shared the URL when they copy the browser address bar URL to paste into an email or an instant message for example.
1 http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/10/dark-social-we-have-the-whole-history-of-the-web-wrong/263523/
2 http://www.lunametrics.com/blog/2013/10/02/direct-monster-fix-dark-social/?
Experiment Shows Up To 60% Of "Direct" Traffic Is Actually Organic Search
Everyone knows that browsers don’t always report where visitors came from when they arrive at a website. When they don’t report where they were in the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) referrer header, often the traffic is considered “Direct” — which really means, “we have no clue where they came from, maybe they typed the URL …
