If you are a digital marketer in some SEO agency, you must be very familiar with Direct and Organic sources. Organic traffic includes non-paid visits, and it is made up of website visitors that enter a site via Google results. In contrast, direct traffic occurs by straight visits via a company URL to a website. This is a simple explanation of direct and organic search terms. However, to gain insights into the Google analytics tool and get more traffic to your web, we need a more elaborate analysis of the above categories of traffic sources.

Types of Traffic Sources

Aside from having the basic knowledge of direct and organic traffic, there are more to traffic sources classification that you should know about. Most web analytics platforms of the major search engine tools like Google, Bing base their determination of traffic source on the referring URL or referring website, which helps them operate their algorithm and flow diagram.

Organic traffic and search engine

Organic traffic consists of all traffic that is not obtained via paid search results. Therefore, they are often known as web visits via any search engine result with paid advertising.

What does organic search mean on Google Analytics?

As we all know, any marketer will want to get as much organic search as possible for a keyword on a Search engine. Google Analytics system emphasizes exploiting every information and aspect on a website to set high rankings on the search results page. Organic traffic is essential to Google ranking evaluation. The more you get organic traffic to your site, the higher you rank on the search tool.

Other traffic types:

• Direct traffic: Traffic gained without directions from any referring website but by visitors coming to the web via the web’s URL.
• Email traffic: the number of people who access a web link through the link put in an email. Email traffic is gained by email marketing.
• Paid search: Traffic coming from effects of a paid search campaign such as Google ads from Google Adwords or other paid search service providers.
• Referral: The traffic coming from another site that includes links leading to the target web address.
• Social: When social media users find a link from an article or a comment from Facebook or any other social media platform. Their clicks at the social network link amount to traffic data of that link’s web page. Major search engine social platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram have the most social traffic referral to other websites.

Is organic search better?

It is not always better than direct search or all other searches if you are confused about this. If you get more direct search instead, it’s maybe that your company is already popular, so it gets higher direct traffic from loyal customers. Hence, other traffics can help uplift the popularity of your site and brand if you are targeting customers from social media or working with them ultimately by emails.

After having some basic knowledge of different traffic sources, let’s look at organic and direct traffic. The main subjects of this post are the best marketing strategy we can build up to get the most visitors to our website.

Understanding direct traffic

Let’s get to analyzing direct search to learn more about this marketing term.

What is direct search mean?

The term direct traffic specifies traffic that doesn’t come from referring sites. As we can see today, almost everyone has a Google account, and people use Google every day, every time. Google searches are the most popular example of referrers that lead people to other websites from its search engine results pages. Direct traffic contrasts with this type of traffic that resorts to referring URLs from a website or a search engine to get to another website.

People often add to the direct traffic data when they type URLs into the address bar on their Chrome, Firefox, or Safari browser and press enter. Direct traffic also includes visits by clicking on a bookmarked link. Although the mentioned reasons are the most common ones, there is a far more complicated and diverse range of direct traffic sources than you may think. As many digital marketers can notice, direct traffic to several websites is rising, especially for growing organic traffic. Let’s layout feasible direct sources that may have contributed to your web traffic:

• Real direct traffic: Your website traffic may actually come from the fact that your visitors really know your URLs address and type it in the address box for instant access.
• Customers: In this case, direct traffic can increase when your customers frequently sign in to your site’s customer portal. A way to see the web analytics without this traffic is to get settings of different views in Google analytics that allow you to.
• Mobile traffic: Browsers on desktops and mobiles can be a factor that interferes with the web analytics of organic traffic. At the same time, direct traffic from desktop users is not considered high; in general, that from mobile users hasn’t ceased to climb up. In fact, in the short future, organic search traffic will be even more influenced by direct website traffic from mobile browsers. This is the result of skydiving numbers of mobile users.
• Internal personnel: Sometimes, your organic traffic tracking can be disturbed because your employees use your website, especially when they don’t have IP excluded from the web analytics. What you need to do is excluding their IPs out of the web analytics.
• Email traffic that has not been transmitted with referring information: This can happen by some email marketing links. You can classify this kind of traffic out by watching out for a rise in direct traffic after an email was delivered.
• Referral traffic via mobile apps or desktop software: There must sometimes be when you see your phone screen or computer screen suddenly switches to another page right after you accidentally click on it. This act can cause direct traffic to your website because it leaves no trace of its referrals.
• The transition from HTTPS (secure sites) to HTTP (non-secure sites): Google has constantly kept up with its search engine index system updates for the best experience to information searchers. One of its effort in this is to make the security of websites highly guaranteed. Secure websites are websites whose address starts with HTTPS, and with the restriction of Google, there are more and more HTTPS websites. According to the security protocol, traffic from a secure website to a non-secure website will not be indicated as referral traffic due to the lack of referring information passed on.

Professional digital marketers suggest that a decent rate of direct traffic for a website is 20 percent. However, with the surge of instant click-caused direct traffic and interferences of browsers on our devices, most digital marketers will have to admit that maintaining this number lower or equal to the expected number will be getting more difficult.

Miscategorized direct traffic

Web analytics is not perfect, and they tend to be misled by nuanced and intricate situations in which referral information fails to be recorded. If your browser doesn’t report referrals from some source, your web analytics are likely to consider the direct traffic automatically.

We all want to avoid our web traffic from being imprecisely classified. Digital marketers understand the significance of sorting out properly where visitors are coming from and identify potential leads. Moreover, you will miss out on the opportunities to get valuable information such as keyword data, topics, and areas that the visitors are paying attention to in the first place. Unfortunately, sometimes we have to deal with falsely recognized direct traffic that pushed our direct traffic percentage up high. There are two types of common miscategorized direct traffic that you may often come across:

Search engines security protocol

It is the same thing we mentioned in the previous heading. Our SEO efforts can be affected by the security protocol of Google, and traffic from a secure site to a non-secure site shows no referral to our browsers. To handle this, you should update your site as secure with a third-party SSL certificate. This will help the browser record referrals from another site if any user finds the link to your web from an HTTPS site and clicks on it.

Error tracking codes

Search engines analytics will not let traffic considered referral traffic if the page that leads to the target page is encrypted with a broken and dysfunctional tracking code.

Understanding organic traffic

The term organic traffic describes the search traffic that comes from a search tool. It must not result from advertising from Google Adwords or any other types of paid search advertisings. The main factor that makes your web rankings high on any major search engine tool is Organic traffic. Hence, the higher your web ranks on Google, the more organic visits you will get. For this results, many inbound marketing tactics and tips concentrate on increasing organic traffic as best as possible.

Organic traffic percentage also depends largely on how optimized your website is. Therefore, many SEO service providers have been born to set forth tools and support for improving all aspects of a website, such as content quality, web design, and gain more organic traffic.

Which is better organic search or paid search?

You can use some paid search to enhance your website’s popularity. Still, if you want a long-standing high position on Google, you will need a high rate of organic visits for sure. Google will make quality a priority, so the best thing is if you pay for advertising, you still need to optimize the site to keep the rankings high.

Biggest Difference Between Direct and Organic Traffic

The most outstanding difference between direct and organic traffic is the situations that make web browsers access the sites or user intent. So is it best if visitors get to your web from a search on Google, or is it always bad that people directly enter your website?

The difference between direct and organic website traffic sources?

In case your site is witnessing many visits via search engine results (or organic traffic). It has landed the top ranking for a particular keyword in Google search; your website is very successful with SEO tactics. You show Google crawlers that your site is optimized with relevant content to the keyword, high security, in-order structure, and a highly effective index.

If you are receiving a high percentage of direct traffic to your website, either you are tackling some problems against your system or your brand name is really popular among customers.

Both direct and organic traffic can mean good signs or bad signs to the success of your business, and you will have to analyze each factor carefully to have the best strategy for your search engine approach.

Bottom line

For marketers who want to master search engines, deep insight into different traffic sources is critical. Traditionally, digital marketers summed up web traffic into two types: organic searches or direct URLs typing on browsers. However, this will rather leave digital marketers short-handed because more types of web visits need to be focused on to optimize search rankings and compete in the marketing market today.

A piece of advice is you should get more organic search traffic and referral traffic which don’t come from paid advertising to get high rankings on search engines by improving the quality of your website. Likewise, getting control of direct traffic and grasp the reasons for its high rate is of necessity also.