[FAQ] What is Direct traffic?

Direct traffic is both its own category of traffic and also a fallback for unidentified referrers.

When a visitor comes from another site, that site will be reported as the referrer. However, there are times when visitors come directly to your website without being referred from another website, and these are recorded as Direct visits. Think about how your browser’s address bar autocompletes URLs you’ve visited before – you likely visit sites directly all the time. This is primarily how your site ends up with Direct traffic in the Referrers report.

However, there are times when a referrer cannot be found for a visitor despite them coming from another website, and these visitors also get counted towards Direct traffic. For instance, if they reach your site via an email link, the email client most likely will strip the referrer data from the browser for security & privacy purposes. When the visitor reaches your site, there is no referrer data for Independent Analytics to read, so they get counted as a direct visitor.

You can win back some of this data by using campaign links with UTM parameters. This gives you an alternative method for accurately tracking how many people reached your link via a specific link, whether it’s added to an email or another website.