Direct/Organic Traffic Misreported

[oddnumber]

Afternoon all, I've a question that I'm sure has been asked before although I can't seem to find an answer.

Has anyone else observed organic traffic reported as direct? Comparing year on year, we're seeing a decrease in organic alongside a commensurate increase in direct in GA. Just wondering if it was a widely noticed and acknowledged thing?

[not2easy]

It sort of sounds like the ideal results. People find your site in the serps, bookmark your site and never visit again from Google.

[ClosedForLunch]

The referring website may not always be revealed, due to privacy etc, so GA perhaps assumes it's direct traffic.

[oddnumber]

Thanks chaps.

It doesn't 'feel' like the traffic source is being reported correctly, indeed there is no reason for the increase in direct and reduction in organic. If anything the reverse should be being observed as our rankings have improved over the last few weeks.

[jediviper]

I have another example.
Most of the pages including referral parameters are including "click_id".
Unfortunately these pages are being included under Direct, Referral and Organic channels, so they mess with our results.
I really wonder why Google can't identify correctly these links.

[NickMNS]

I really wonder why Google can't identify correctly these links.

It's not that they can't, it's that they are not allowed to. See @ClosedForLunch's post:

The referring website may not always be revealed, due to privacy....

[jediviper]

Well still it doesn;t make sense.
The post of @ClosedForLunch mentions that the traffic is classified as Direct instead of Referral. Still it's better than what happens in my case, where some of the click_id pages fall under the Organic channel.
This is the biggest headache.

[NickMNS]

Well still it doesn;t make sense.
The post of @ClosedForLunch mentions that the traffic is classified as Direct instead of Referral

Careful, @ClosedForLunch said:

The referring website may not always be revealed

The referring website, means the website that appears in referer header, that site is the site where the user was before coming to yours, it could have been Google, Bing or any other website. When referer is not shown, Analytics assumes that the user did not come from anywhere, thus is "direct". But not knowing where the user came from does not allow you to assume that this was "refferral" traffic. You don't know, and you can't know and that is the point, privacy.

As to the click_id issue, I have no idea. Just guessing here, is it possible that Google indexed a url with the click_id param and it is appearing the SERPs.