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
