What is Responsible for All My "Direct" Traffic?

[BG1985]

We have a broad content site - the majority of our traffic overall comes in via deep links.Google analytics consistently shows 17-20% of daily traffic under the "direct" bucket, with the rest of the traffic about equally split between Referring sites and Organic search.However, if we look at the specific content in the "direct" bucket, the URLs that are being hit do tend to mirror rather closely the Search traffic.  The close mapping to our Search traffic doesn't seem to make much sense  - while some of it is probably bookmarks, it seems doubtful that that could be responsible for more than, say, 20% of this direct traffici based on the # of pages and types of pages (many of the pages that do well in search are honestly not ones that someone would be likely to bookmark).  The traffic reported by google as "direct" for a given day tracks a lot closer to Search than Referral URLs (which tend to be he more viral content on our site). Any idea what could be causing this traffic to show as Direct?  Do people tend to bookmark pages while doing searches to come back to them or something? THANKS everyone for the responses.  Still not quite sure what it is, continuing to look into it, particularly technical issues that the link to the Avinash post might prove very helpful for

[Cyle]

I would double check and make sure that all your campaigns: Email, Bing/other networks PPC & Retargeting ads etc. All have Google's utm parameters setup on them.  These are all areas that webmasters tend to overlook.  The PPC ads tend to still be listed under organic search, but you can't segment out the paid or non-paid Bing (other network PPC) traffic without the tracking installed.  Here is a great blog post that Avinash wrote on tracking direct traffic correctly.  I would start here and make sure you have everything setup correctly before looking for other nuances.  http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/2010/09/excellent-web-analytics-tip-analyze-direct-traffic.html

[robertdempsey]

I'm curious about this too as I get a lot of "direct traffic." I know for a fact that my content is shared via Twitter using a lot of different URL shorteners. I'm guessing (and trying to determine as fact or fiction) that the clicks on the links result in "direct traffic" showing up in Google Analytics. With my domain name - itinerantentrepreneur.com - which I can barely spell most of the time, I seriously doubt people are typing it in by hand And yes, I purchased an alternate domain name and pointed it to my site.

[RyanPurkey]

Would any of the pages that are getting a lot of direct traffic also be popular for a home page, or as a tab that someone would keep open on their browser?  Also, I've seen some shopping carts strip referral data and Google then refers to them as (direct).  Try to do a visitor audit and see if there are any pages or functions on your site that turn someone from being a search or referral visit into a direct visit.

[EGOL]

Might also be type-ins and people using your site as a start-up page or desk-top email software.

[AlanBleiweiss]

Oh yeah - there's those pesky bots out there as well...

[EGOL]

Robots?

[AlanBleiweiss]

Quite often when you see such a significant correlation between direct traffic URLs and search traffic, this is due to people who previously visited the site and bookmarked it, or got the link sent to them from someone who did.