The mystery of Direct Traffic in SEO
If you know your Google Analytics and please guys, you’re my clients I know quite a few of you hardly ever check, but if you do – please pay attention to your Direct Traffic.
My quest started when I realised that WordPress was automatically adding a specific Tag to all external links on their platform. If you wanted to link to Spotify you usually write something like this:
<a href="https://www.spotify.com/">Spotify</a>However, that code would mean users leaving your website to go to Spotify’s… not what you want. The solution was to force the Browser to open an external link in a new Tab or window – like this:
<a href="https://www.spotify.com/" target="_blank">Spotify/a>The ‘target=”_blank”‘tells the browser to open in a fresh blank window. So far so good. However, the Internet has been debating this for years. The arguments flow for and against this simple solution to effectively keep users on your website. Those for it saying – why not refer people to a fresh page when looking at some different content and those against saying this harms the very essence of sharing information online.
The reality is more simple… we’re in it for the money and it makes no financial sense for anyone to ever leave your website. Most content providers still use this simple technique to open a new browser window.
Tracking and Hacking
The first good news is that if a user can click an external link, so can Google. Google can form a relationship between the two websites. If you put links to your website on another website – you get kudos and you can track where people come from. Spotify can literally see where their customer has found their links.
Slightly more maliciously, there’s a weakness in that it is possible to track links back to where they come from and possibly control the referring website. So, if someone wants to trace that Spotify link back to your website they could, in theory, harm your website. All a bit techie and unlikely.
The result, however, is that nig name platforms like WordPress and Shopify have battled to prevent this hacking or malicious use of Browsers. Simply put they have used some very old tech to block this.
Now each time you set a link to open in a Blank window, WordPress, Shopify and others will automatically add the following code to your links:
<a href="https://www.spotify.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Spotify/a>Noopener is fairly straightforward. It tells the browser to NOT open the page it was referred by. If you add this link to your website Spotify cannot then open your website page as a consequence. That protects your website from the malicious stuff I mentioned above.
Noreferrer, however, tells the Browser not to pass on where a link came from. In other words, Spotify knows a user will have landed on their website but they don’t know where from. The information is not sent.
A word to the wise, the noreferrer tag does not harm SEO, your website still gets the kudos for the link, it just does not send the information on.
Enter Direct Traffic
And now we come to the core of this piece, your contacts, friends, family, clients, suppliers, customers and social media are furiously following your instructions and adding lots of lovely links to your website for your SEO. With these new additions of noopener and more importantly noreferrer. The result of this is that you can no longer tell where your visitors have come from. The browser is not passing on this information. Google Analytics is just putting all this traffic to your website in the ‘Direct’ traffic box.
Direct Traffic is that area of Google Analytics that used to be about people phyiscally typing in your url painstakingly into their browser to see your website. They might have read a flyer or an advert in a magazine and be actually typing in the URL.
However, these days it’s far more likely that Direct Traffic consists of all the traffic Google cannot explain. A sort of junk dumping ground and, to be honest, that’s exactly the position we have taken when doing SEO. Direct traffic is the unknown stuff and thus can be ignored.
There is more… always more… Direct Traffic, nowadays, also consists of a lot of App Traffic. If you have a mobile and view an App like LinkedIn or Twitter, see a link click on it. Google Analytics will have no idea where it has come from.
And this is the key… no longer should we be ignoring ‘Direct’ traffic – instead we need to be explaining it at every opportunity. We also need to be finding ways to improve tracking and reduce this black hole of Direct traffic.
Solution for Direct Traffic SEO
Here goes:
- UTM Links – https://raventools.com/marketing-reports/google-analytics/url-builder/
Make every link count and specify the UTL parameter to precisely match your needs. If you have an editorial on The Sun website set up your Campaign Source, Medium and Name. This will override the noreferrer information and provide you with more detailed traffic analytics. - Landing Pages – if you really have managed to get an editorial on The Sun’s website then create a landing page for them to land on… use ‘yourdomainname.com/thesun’ and on the resulting page Welcome Sun Readers – make the page count for the readership it is directed at.
Direct Traffic Complancy
I will finish off… what’s happened in the past is we’ve been lazy, there is so much traffic out there to websites that we simply have not accounted for. Truth is, while SEO traffic is declining or Mobile traffic increasing, there is more traffic that is unexplained.
And it needs to be explained and more to the point with just a few extra steps it can be explained. Next time you give your link to anyone knowing they might use it online, do it properly. Go the extra mile and either send them to a right page on the website (that you can measure) or add UTM tags so you can track. It is quick and easy.
And if you are successful at doing that, then you might be able to justify the signwriting on your van. When people really do type in a URL for your website – they will have read it in some traffic jam somewhere.