Changes in direct hit traffic numbers - related to the AJAX tests?

[darkyl]

As other people, I had a high number of unknown referral (direct hits) recently, which are probably related to Google ajax serps.

In the last days I've noticed a decrease in traffic, around 10%.

The strange things is that this seems to coincides with a decrease in the "direct hits", which are 80% less.

Organic traffic is down a bit, but not enought to justify the difference.
I don't know what to think about this, any thoughts?

[darkyl]

Topic has been modified by admins, probably because of my bad english ;)

Anyway what I meant is that global number of visitors decreased but organic traffic and referrals dit NOT decrease.

Only direct hits (ajax serps) decreased and unless there's a bug in the reporting (and they're not even counted as "direct" anymore), it doesn't make sense to me.

[cgrantski]

I believe that the Google experiment, which might or might not be affecting your audience, produces a referrer of "www.google.com" with no search terms. It does not turn hits from google into no-referrer hits (so-called direct traffic).

At the same time, something is going on, but I don't think it is related to this experiment. Our analytics tool allows us to track this stuff in detail, and although we don't see much of the no-search-term traffic (about 1/4 of one percent, and it hasn't changed for months), we DO see a rise in the percentage of Google pay per click traffic that has no referrer at all. This number, over the past three years, has varied widely from 20% of all PPC traffic to 8%. Last month, it rose to almost 10%, which is the highest I've seen for a while - it was rock-solid 8% for about 6 months.

We attribute the no-referrer traffic to those search engines or AdSense partners that code their links so they open in a new browser window. We're pretty sure of this because of some research we did comparing IE visits (which loses the referrer when this is done) to FF visits (which do not).

We see a lot more of the no-referrer PPC traffic when we allow Content Network displays. Most of the time we don't use Content Network, though. We think the search traffic that has no referrer is either new search engine partners that Google adds or drops, or practices of those partners.

This is a long answer to a short question. Bottom line: given what is known about the Google # URL experiment (the Ajax stuff), direct traffic is not affected.

If anybody has additional information about all of this, I'd love to hear it.