Are organic search visitors always seen as organic in origin, even if their return to the site is direct?

[WSPL]

Many of our conversions occur in a customers second visit to the site. Often, a customer will arrive at our site, submit a finance application, leave, and return at a later date to checkout.

We are interested in tracking how many of our checkouts come from customers who originally found our site through an organic search result.

If a customer enters the site through organic search, leaves, and returns later through an email link or directly entering our URL, will G analytics show that customer as direct or organic origin?

Cheers,

Ben

[evolvingSEO]

I think what you're really looking to do is use multi touch funnels and attribution. And the metric you are trying to measure is called "first touch" - meaning the source of the first visit gets the credit.

If your analytics is set up for goals and/or ecommerce tracking which is all pretty easy to do, you can see all of the default multi touch reports in GA.

Here's their intro guide and guide on setting it up.

-Dan

[AndersS]

Yes, according to Google Analytics IQ curriculum (see https://www.google.com/analytics/iq.html, lesson 3 about traffic sources), direct traffic will not override previous campaign sources - at least for conversion attribution.

You could also have a look at the reports "Assisted conversions" + "Top Conversion paths" in the Conversions > Multi-channel Funnels section in Google Analytics to get more information.

Hope this helps!

[Perfect007]

Yes, GA will treat like this if they don't have active session. If that visitor is working same session then it will not overwrite organic. It will not increase your organic search either. It will only show the increment in your page views.

I don't think there is any service available to track organic traffic over multiple days/sessions.

[WSPL]

I've done a little more reading and found that <direct>will never overwrite <organic>(as long as the cookie is active, <6 months) as discussed here: http://www.hmtweb.com/marketing-blog/google-analytics-referring-sources-experiment/</organic></direct>

Correct?

[WSPL]

Is that only when they do not have an active session? I believe direct will never overwrite organic origin when the session is active?

Are there any services available to track organic traffic over multiple days/sessions?

[Perfect007]

G Anlytics will count them direct visitor and also it will count under returning visitors.