Traffic structure

Referred vs direct traffic

[interested]

Hi everyone,

I was checking our traffic stats and noticed the huge amount of direct traffic vs referred traffic from search engines, other sites etc. 80% of traffic seems to be direct, but it seems too good to be true.

Have you noticed anything similar? Which are the numbers in your experience?

Thanks!
Interested

[diamondgrl]

Have you excluded bots from your calculation? Googlebot and Yahoo's Slurp and other bots will not show a referer, thereby skewing your statistics.

[treeline]

I also get a high percentage of direct traffic, even after excluding bots. I've also wondered about this. Any more ideas?

[winmorgan]

Noticed this, too, using WebTrends 7.0

Doesn't seem right to me.

[diamondgrl]

How do you make sure they are not bots? Sometimes a bot will tell you who it is. Othertimes, it could spoof a real user by using a useragent name of a normal browser.

What I would do is see if there are an unusual number of hits coming from any particular domain. If so, it may be a bot you haven't taken into account. That's what I usually find when my organic versus search-engine-refered numbers get all out of whack.

[chrisgarrett]

A lot of people now have referrers blocked using privacy/ad-blocking software. Direct traffic is a good thing though, it means your site is memorable and appealing enough. Eg. I never click a link to go to WebmasterWorld, do you?

You can see how many people bookmark your site by looking at your favourites icon downloads.

[interested]

Thanks to everyone for the opinions!

Chrisgarrett, I agree with you that if the direct traffic percentage is high, it partly shows the quality of the site etc. And also partly this true for my site... But only partly. Why? Because when I look at the traffic structure and visitor behaviour, the average is like 1,7 visits per visitor. But I would guess that if the visitor thinks so highly of the content etc in order to remember the site, it would make more visits on a year than just one or two. I know that I would...

In our case, I partly understand the lack of visits from referrers, because we`ve got rather few listings on search engines. Nevertheless we have a pretty good Google ranking and also a considerable number of visits. But as much as I would like to think that everyone knows us, I`m a bit suspicious.

I still have to check the info about bots tough... This might be the catch I was looking for.

[chrisgarrett]

Perhaps people are clicking on email signature links, just visit the homepage to see what it looks like? Do you have hotmail, yahoo mail, etc in your referrers?

[interested]

Nope. But I wouldn`t count on that idea... The area is too narrow for those suggestions I think. We`re strictly financial oriented with rather specific target group.