What Is Direct Traffic in Analytics?

Answer

Direct traffic represents visits where no referrer information is available.

Definition

Traffic that has not come from an identifiable external traffic source. These identifiable external traffic sources are usually links that can be clicked on other websites/domains and search engines.

Also, see the article "Behavior Tracking Terminology" for a definition of Direct traffic (first visit) and Direct traffic (returning visit).

Direct traffic occurs in the following cases:

• Visitors coming to your website via links in their email-clients (Outlook, Lotus Notes, etc), including when they click on links in newsletters.

• Visitors coming to your website via clicking on bookmarks in their browser.
• Visitors coming to your website by typing in the URL of your page directly into their browser
• Visitors coming to your website via links from PDFs.
• Visitors coming to your website by clicking on ad banners may also not send a referrer URL depending on their redirect.
• Visitors coming to your website by clicking on shortening URLs can be direct traffic depending on their redirects
• Visitors coming to your website by clicking on a URL on a website with referral policy blocking referrer data.