Avinash Kaushik Reports on the Importance of “Making Love” to Your Direct Traffic

In his “Occam’s Razor” blog, Avinash Kaushik recently posted an article with a rather provocative title: “Make Love to Your Direct Traffic.” By direct traffic, he means everyone who proactively seeks you out on your site by typing in your URL or uses a bookmark. This includes four different, measurable groups of people:

Existing customers

People familiar with your brand

Word-of-mouth traffic

People driven by offline campaigns such as TV, radio, outdoor, etc.

Direct traffic visitors, Kaushik says, “have an extra motivation connected to their visit.” They know what they’re looking for and they know you provide it.

So it would seem obvious, then, that web marketers would pay extra special attention to this already-in-the-hand market when using them to determine accurate traffic reports to their sites. But the reality, Kaushik says, is that most people don’t.

He adamantly recommends segmenting direct traffic into your data, as it will improve your KPIs considerably. It also tends to help clean up incorrectly tracked links that have no tracking parameters. Such links are automatically categorized as “direct traffic,” which is usually not the case.

Kaushik offers several ways to keep your direct traffic “clean,” and avoid polluting your direct traffic results. He also points out several “warning” signals that the direct traffic you’re receiving may not be entirely genuine, including:

Missing web analytics tags

Untagged campaigns

Improperly tagged campaign parameters

Improperly coded redirects/Vanity URLs

“Heavy” tags at the bottom of the page

Other miscellaneous, easy-to-fix problems

By eliminating these telltale “polluters” from your direct traffic list, you can compile a list of links who are truly repeat customers who know your company name and URL without having to be told.