Direct Traffic

What is Direct Traffic? – Definition

Direct traffic is one of the traffic sources that appear in Google Analytics reports. Direct traffic is when a user goes to a particular website by entering a URL in a web browser’s address bar or using an address saved in bookmarks. Direct traffic may also include clicking on a link in non-web documents, such as Word, Excel or PDF files, as well as entering a page with a link in an email received from an email reader (e.g. Thunderbird or Outlook).

What is the Source of Direct Traffic?

The analysis of direct traffic allows checking if a given brand has a large group of regular customers. Direct traffic is generated by several categories of users. These include people who: remembered the website URL or saved it in a bookmark, guessed the URL once they associated it with the brand, found out about the website through an offline marketing campaign (e.g. billboards, from a newspaper), visited the site because it was recommended by other people or entered the site from other sources, which, due to technical errors, were not assigned. It is worth noting that when entering a URL in the address bar, the web browser suggests users pages that they have previously visited.