If you still can’t figure out the actual issue, you may want to have a Google Analytics audit. The above mentioned are three of the main reasons for a spike in direct traffic. Your own domain name will show up as referral which is known as self-referral. If you have a single page on your site that is missing Google Analytics tracking code, then the traffic flowing through that page will result in a direct traffic. Step 3: Click on Copy URL and paste it into your email newsletter (ad, social, etc) instead of your regular untagged link. If you have migrated your site from HTTP to HTTPs, you will have to follow make sure Google Analytics tracks referrals. As you type, you will see that the new URL is being auto-generated. By moving from non-secure to secure SSL, the referral traffic will be shown as direct. If you have recently moved your website from HTTP to HTTPs, this could be a reason if you didn’t made the required changes in Google Analytics. This will help you see the number of traffic coming from Android, IOS or any other OS. To go further, you can add the secondary dimension as operating system. It is important to tag all the URLs you shared with UTM parameters in order to properly attribute the source of traffic idn Google Analytics. The reason this is showing up as direct is because we didn’t addd UTM parameters to the URL we shared. We can assume that the traffic is coming from the blog post we shared during the selected date range. Click on the landing page with more users and add secondary dimension as device category.ĭNow we can see the highest number of traffic is coming from mobile device. We can’t say anything else about direct traffic on this stage because we only know the landing page. Now we can see the landing page that is responsible for a jump in direct traffic. To view direct traffic by landing page, navigate to Acquisition > All Traffic > Channels.Ĭlick on the direct channel to view the landing page. This is where the query string or URL parameter comes into play. Google Analytics won’t tell us which redirect they came from. The first thing to figure out is the landing page that is responsible. In Google Analytics, each of these efforts will show up as Direct traffic to the main page, even if they all have their own specific redirect (e.g., /LMA, /lawmag, /swag). Okay, now we know that we have a high number of users for direct traffic.
Below are few of the things you should do to recognize the traffic. Whenever you see an unusual behavior with direct traffic, the right way to find the reason is by going into the details. The fact is that Google Analytics records all that traffic for which it couldn’t recognize the traffic source. We only care about direct traffic when we see an unusual rise in metrics like new users, sessions, bounce rate.etc. We always assume that people coming to our site by typing the URL in browser are known as direct, which is not true. One of the category/default channel grouping is direct. Google Analytics categorizes traffic coming from different sources into specific categories.