Understanding Direct Traffic as Traffic from Shared Links

Fred Wilson recently asked on his blog, Does This Blog Get More Traffic From Google or Twitter. Fred’s referrer logs showed 31.9% traffic from Direct, 14.8%, from Google, and 8.2% from Twitter. Fred’s guess was that much of the Direct traffic was also coming from Twitter, via desktop and mobile client apps.

This morning, I recorded a quick screencast showing how to better understand Direct traffic, which in my opinion is a bit of a misnomer.

Understanding Direct Traffic as Traffic from Shared Links from kortina on Vimeo. (Please forgive me, the sound is a little out of sync in the screencast after uploading, but I watched it and it still makes sense.)

As you can see in the screencast, if you dig into your Traffic Report in Google Analytics, choose Direct Traffic, and then choose Landing Page from the Dimension dropdown, few of your Direct Traffic hits will be to your home page. And the Direct hits to your home page are probably the only hits derived from someone typing a URL into their browser address bar. Do you think anyone will type http://labs.kortina.net/2009/07/08/quick-add-to-google-calendar-via-sms/ into their address bar? No, that is definitely a click from somewhere.

The only reason hits to pages other than your homepage show up under Direct Traffic is because they do not have an HTTP Referer Header. Typically, in your browser, when you click a link on Page X to Page Y, your browser sends a bit of data along with the request to fetch Page Y from wherever it’s being server that says, “by the way, this request was referred by Page X.”  Desktop applications–email clients like Outlook, for example–do not send this referrer data, so clicks derived from these apps get grouped under Direct Traffic.

The name Direct Traffic can be kind of misleading, however, because the first thing everyone thinks when they see Direct is someone typing a link into their address bar. In fact, very little Direct Traffic is actually direct. A better name for Direct Traffic would be Shared Link Traffic–think about the apps that are likely to generate this type of traffic: email clients, twitter clients, desktop RSS readers, facebook clients. These are all essentially sharing tools.

At bit.ly, we’ve been working with a few partners to demystify the Direct Traffic category a bit. If you work on a desktop or mobile app and want to make traffic you drive more easily understandable to publishers, please see our Registered Applications program and get in touch with us: support at bit.ly.

Here’s a quick way to use the data shown in the screencast to estimate your Shared Link Traffic.

How To Estimate Shared Link Traffic

In Google Analytics, go to Traffic Sources > Direct Traffic > Dimensions > Landing Page. Find the number of hits to “/”. In my case this is 16.

Subtract this from the total number of visits at the top of the report:

246 – 16 = 230

Now go to Traffic Sources > Referrings Sites. Find the number of hits from the domains,

facebook.com: 3
twitter.com: 54

(Others you might want to look for for this report: mail.google.com, mail.yahoo.com)

Add these to the Direct shared link traffic:

3 + 54 + 230 = 287

Go to Traffic Sources > Overview. From the top of the page, find the number “All traffic sources sent a total of 1,414 visits” and divide your shared link traffic by this number.

287/1414 = .2029

20.29% Visits from Shared Links

(probably an under estimate because I left out some link sharing domains)

On my blog, Google accounted for 756 vists, or 53.47% of visits.

So for me, Google still dominates shared links, but my guess is that, given a cursory look at Fred’s number, he does in fact get more traffic from shared links than from Google searches.

The point is not whether Twitter per say drives more traffic than search–what is important is to note how much traffic comes from friends and colleagues sharing and understanding the value of these clicks compared to simple website referrals and Google search.

– I just posted to hacker news – hopefully some of those guys will weigh in with more tips for how to refine this technique.

Related posts:

1. Derived vs Direct Value of Network Services
2. How To Make a Fixed Link to Twitter That’s Always Visible on Your Webpage
3. Meaningful Referrer Data and Semantic Web
4. Send To Tumblr And Track With Bitly Google Reader Custom Link
5. How to Effectively Use Sharing Links in Automated Emails to Customers