It has been quite a while since digital marketers began to simplify organic and direct traffic. Most people think that organic traffic comprises search engine visits, and direct traffic includes visitors who enter your website’s URL in their web browser. Although this is the common perception regarding organic traffic versus direct traffic, the actual situation is more complex than this simplistic explanation. To help you understand what we see in Google Analytics about traffic sources, here’s a sample report using GA4, the newest version of Google Analytics (as a reminder, if you haven’t made the switch yet from Universal Analytics –UA– to GA4, you need to make the change today, as UA will disappear very soon). Note in this sample data, direct is the top source of traffic while organic is the second biggest contributor to traffic on the website. What does your GA4 report show? Go ahead and open a new tab to find out. I’ll wait!
Organic traffic versus direct traffic
So, why does it matter how you define traffic (or even why should you bother monitoring the performance of different traffic channels sending visitors to your website)? The answer is much simpler than defining organic traffic versus direct traffic. Insights about where your traffic comes from and what visitors from different channels do on your website (ie. do they convert?) go a long way toward improving your performance. By investing more effort and money into campaigns that deliver results and improving campaigns that fail to deliver you improve your performance and your bottom line. And, who doesn’t want to make more money?
Below, you see a breakdown showing how well different marketing channels deliver a return on your investment (ROI). As you can see, some channels satisfy ROI goals better than others, according to self-reports from users. As you can see, organic search delivers higher returns than direct traffic (in fact, it delivers a higher ROI than any channel except email and organic social). Understanding the difference between organic and direct traffic allows you to implement the right strategy to increase traffic from these sources and, thus, increase your ROI.
How do you define direct traffic?
Direct traffic refers to any user who entered the address of a site directly into their browser’s search box. But, there are lots of other ways traffic might get categorized as direct, including some types of traffic that might better be categorized as organic.
To truly understand direct traffic you must analyze it using tweezers since it usually comes from internal employees, partners, or even the customers/clients who visit your site to log into their accounts. Clicks from links in email messages when the email provider doesn’t pass on the referral end up as direct traffic. So does a lot of your mobile traffic, especially if it comes from an app. Thus, direct traffic is actually a hodgepodge of different ways users find your website. Because mobile and apps represent increasingly more attractive choices for visiting websites, the rates of visits classified as direct continue to rise, according to Monte Carlo experiments run by Groupon, which also shows that up to 60% of direct traffic is actually organic. Of course, this data is from 2016, so the landscape likely changed a bit since then.
The number of visits that are direct and their percentage in the number of visits total, and the behavior of those who came directly to the website (in Google Analytics, it is between predefined segments, which means only a couple of mouse clicks) are significant indicators for analyzing the quality of traffic on a site. The tools for Web Analytics themselves categorize traffic based on source and identify the direct traffic.
Increasing the amount of direct traffic comes through increasing your organic traffic since much of the traffic categorized as direct is actually organic. Hence, doing the things recommended below will also increase your direct traffic. Beyond that, try improving your social media presence. This prompts users to enter your website directly by inputting your brand name into the search engine. Increasing your advertising expenses and the success of your campaigns also brings your name to the attention of potential visitors and much of this counts as direct traffic.
What is organic traffic?
Organic traffic is a free form of traffic which is what gives it the kind of traffic website owners are looking for the most.”Organic traffic” refers to visitors who visit your website due to unpaid (“organic”) results from a search, hence the opposite of paid traffic is organic traffic. Organic visitors arrive at your site after using search engines like Google or Bing; therefore, they do not get “referred” by any other website. Gaining these clicks relies on good SEO (search engine optimization) that results in a favorable position in the search engine results pages. You know from your own experiences that you don’t usually scroll from page to page of search results. You choose a link near the top of the results on page 1. Gaining more organic traffic rests on doing a better job with your SEO to improve your rank.
The most effective way to boost the number of visitors to your site is to post valuable and high-quality content to your blog regularly. However, this is only one strategy employed to get new visitors. SEO Search Engine Optimization is part of internet-based marketing that focuses on increasing organic traffic.
Among the other things you can do to improve your search engine rank are:
- gain backlinks from other high-quality websites usually based on the value of your content
- ensure your site is user-friendly with good security (such as an SSL certificate), a good user experience through easy navigation, and good performance on mobile devices
- outgoing links to high-quality websites showing you’ve done your homework to find reliable information
- good visuals and other content variety
- entice visitors to stay on your site longer
- fast load time
- engagement on social media
The biggest difference between direct & organic traffic?
There is a significant difference between organic and direct traffic based on the user’s intent. If you’re getting a lot of organic visitors, it indicates that you’re doing a great job at creating your online presence to appeal to the needs of search engines.
Your site is ranked highly for specific keywords, which drives more traffic to your site. If you’re getting many visitors directly, it means you’re suffering from one of the issues mentioned in the previous paragraphs, or you’ve got plenty of brand awareness within your field.
Final thoughts
Ultimately, direct and organic traffic are significant in driving website visits and enhancing overall performance. Organic traffic is crucial for long-term sustainable growth and increasing search engine rankings.
At the same time, direct traffic can provide insight into how effective offline efforts are in promoting brand recognition. It is crucial for companies to know the difference between these two sources of traffic and devise strategies to utilize them to meet their goals for marketing. Suppose they invest in a digital marketing strategy incorporating direct and organic traffic. In that case, companies can draw more people, connect with their target audience, and achieve more online performance.
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