Figuring Out the Source of "direct traffic" by looking at landing page parameters

[williammarlow]

I have a client who runs an e-commerce website, and I noticed that 40% of his traffic and 25% of his sales are all attributable to Direct Traffic.  At first, I tried to solve this problem by tagging all of the previously untagged links in his e-newsletter, which I expect to be very helpful.

However, then I looked at the landing pages for his direct traffic, and I see that it is almost entirely filled with thousands of unique URLs that begin with a question mark followed by the name of his e-newsletter or shopping cart vendor.  It would be the equivalent of having a url like the following: "www.willmarlow.com/?constantcontact=keya;sldkfjsdlfkjdf;sldkjf"

If we have this amount of information in the link, shouldn't there be a way to add additional parameters to the URL to move this traffic out of the Direct column?  Has anyone encountered this before? Thanks.

[mememax]

Sure hope you can fix that

[williammarlow]

Thanks to both of you.  These are very helpful answers - I'll let you know how this works out! I think you are both right.

[Francisco_Meza]

Sounds like the buyer is leaving the website to make a payment then coming back, which would be a direct visit. You said " shopping cart vendor". When someone goes to make a payment, do they leave the site?

[mememax]

Hi Will, I imagine you (or your client) will have full control on the email vendor. In that case you may ask them to add to each link the utm tags which will help GA to recognize correctly that traffic.

My recommendation is to add to each link the following:

• utm_source=newsletter
• utm_medium=email
• utm_campaign=(the_month_you_sent_the_newsletter)
• utm_content=(the portion of the ad where the click so you can see which parts of the ad performs the best)

That would be enough, but you still have the utm_term available where you can insert any other thing you may want to track.

Hope this helps!