Organic Traffic being counted as direct

[HoosierBuff]

Is this a problem that is increasing for anyone? I continue to see landing pages in my GA direct traffic that could not possibly be landing pages for anyone typing it in directly.

It seems to have gotten worse in the last few months. Has anyone else noticed this?

 

[CodyBaird]

I'm so frustrated with spam in analytics that I don't even share any GA data with clients other than goal completions.

I don't trust GMB data, GSC data, GA data. The only thing I trust are my call tracking numbers.

Sooooooo annoyed with it all that just typing this almost ruins my evening.

Sent from my SM-G900V using Tapatalk

 

[Eric Rohrback]

Use something like Piwik and compare the data. Piwik is self-hosted, so as long as your server (website) is still working this will work. The only thing you need to watch is the load time. As long as you minify & compress calls, you should be fine using this as a data collection method.

" I continue to see landing pages in my GA direct traffic that could not possibly be landing pages for anyone typing it in directly."

How do you know people aren't bookmarking the page? If they clear cookies/cache then it will drop your tracking cookie and will report as direct the next time they visit.

 

[theitsage]

You're seeing this as the result of more search engines and social media sites are implementing https. Traffic from https to http will not contain a referrer source by default.

Google, Facebook, and Twitter have a workaround to send referrer data from https to http. The best way to ensure you get a more accurate analytics data is to move the site to https.

Another possible reason is privacy settings in web browsers. People are more aware of ads and tracking scripts so they are using various measures to interrupt this data collecting process.

 

[James Watt]

I hadn't even thought of how the move to https might affect tracking, thanks for bringing that up.