Increase of direct traffic

[Loui-60570]

Hi everyone,

We have a weird issue in our Google Analytics account. We have enormous amount of direct traffic, but not to our homepage, but to blogs that are published and posted to facebook.

e.g. yesterday we did a post and it received 3.500 visits of which 2.900 were direct. 
I'm unable to figure out how this is possible. 90% of the direct traffic comes from mobile phones

Anyone has an idea?

[Loui-60570]

Morning Martijn,

This is our Facebook page. As far as I can see Hootsuite does not include UTM tags.
We've implemented GA via GTM, but all the tags are fired OK.

Thanks

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

Hi, what would be the full URL of these post including all the UTM tags? There could be the problem as something could be missing there.

[Loui-60570]

Hi Tom,

Thanks. The site is a simple WordPress site. We use Hootsuite to post to social.
I've been checking the logs, but all the traffic via the ow.ly links are treated as medium facebook.com

Based on the post that is receiving massive amounts of direct traffic (2.900) 1.600 is Android 1.300 is iOS

[TomRayner]

Hi there

It's important to remember that "direct" as a source does not only mean people who have entered the URL in their browser and come directly.  It also groups in any traffic that Google Analytics is unable to identify the source.  So for example, if someone comes to your site via one of the Facebook ads or another ad across the internet and, for some reason, GA loses the original source, it will group it into direct.

I imagine this is what's happening here - along the way, GA is losing Facebook as the referral source.  Without knowing how your site works, this might be because of redirects or mobile sites or something else.  What would be interesting to see is which mobile devices are coming in as "direct", are they iPhones, Androids etc?  Might be device related.  You can see that by segmenting your traffic and going into Audience -> Technology.

Hope this helps.