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Google Analytics Showing All Organic Users as Direct

by BenSalez
4 replies
  • SEO
    • |
So here is my situation.

About 48 hours ago I noticed a significant decline in organic visitors and a huge surge in direct visitors. This is pretty much impossible, as this is a niche site with no word of mouth... only SEO'd traffic.

Then this morning I checked my stats and found that almost 100% of my visitors are being tagged as "direct" and only a few are trickling in as organic.

I have not made any changes to the website and it is confusing because this is a static CSS page, not wordpress with any plugins that might affect google reading my site.

I checked the google forums and found that many people have had with problem and no concrete solution was posted.

Any one else ever had this issue? How did you fix it?

Ben
#analytics #direct #google #organic #showing #users
  • Profile picture of the author j0s3
    Hi BenSalez,

    There's nothing to fix. Google test and tweak constantly... and they mess things up too.

    The google dance doesn't just apply to SERPs...

    But yes, it's a pain when you're trying to track something.

    If you're serious about tracking this particular site, install a second tracker and compare results.
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  • Profile picture of the author kevinw1
    A big chunk of my Google traffic shows as "referral" not "organic", which is confusing too.
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    • Profile picture of the author Bewley
      Hi, You may have seen this during your trawl through the GA forums. But it might shed a bit more light.

      "Direct traffic is every traffic of which the referrer is unknown - so in addition to:

      Typing in the URL in the browser
      Accessing from browser bookmarks

      direct traffic can mean:

      Accessing from links in email footers or newsletters without campaign identifications
      Accessing from links in office documents like Word, Excel, Powerpoint, or PDF documents
      Accessing via server or client redirects (301, meta refresh tags etc.) depending on server or browser settings
      Accessing from users in very security-restricted environments (no referers passed)
      as well - i.e. links from a variety of non-standard-webpage environments."

      Apparently, tabbed browsing creates direct direct traffic!

      Source: What does Direct Traffic really mean? - Google Analytics Help

      Have you checked the stats from your server logs to see if they correspond with the trend showing in GA?

      Adrian
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  • Profile picture of the author Goatboy
    Mine have been showing a lot of referral traffic from places like Google.it and Google.fr. This has only been happening for the last week. So it most likely is something that Google is trying, or some change they've made to their algorithm or reporting.
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