Introduction

If you’ve ever used Google Analytics, you’re probably familiar with direct traffic.

This type of traffic is counted when visitors reach your websites from sources that Google Analytics doesn’t track. Specifically, traffic is tagged as direct when a user lands on your page by:

1. Typing a URL directly into their browser

2. Scanning a QR code link through their phone

3. Clicking on a saved bookmark

4. Automatically opening your page/s on browser startup

5. Clicking on a link in an email

It’s one of the most important digital marketing metrics, but it can also leave out a lot of important details.

In this article, we’ll take a close look at the challenges and opportunities that come with monitoring this metric—as well as ways that you can use TinyURL to squeeze more value out of your direct traffic numbers.

How Should I Interpret Direct Traffic?

Direct traffic gives you a count of people going directly to your website. Naturally, this can obscure some useful marketing info as well. For this section, we’ll go over some common insights that marketers and business owners can draw from this statistic.

Users Might Know How to Reach You

Direct traffic is a convenient way to get a sense of how many people visit your site by instinct.

The internet is full of opportunities to link to your site—so if your overall user count is high and skewed toward direct traffic, then it’s possible that you’ve made it into popular consciousness. Just think of how few desktop users need to discover Facebook.com through hyperlinks; some sites and brands are woven into people’s browsing habits.

Of course, this isn’t a guarantee: if you’re only getting a handful of users and most of them come from direct traffic, then that could also be a sign that your word-of-mouth marketing efforts are doing better than your SEO. As with any data point, read it in the broader context of your other metrics and how your business is doing.

Your Offline Marketing Might Be Doing Well

These numbers could be very helpful in telling you how well your billboards, SMS campaigns, and other traditional marketing initiatives generate site traffic. 

One limitation of digital marketing analytics is that it can be tricky to figure out how well your offline marketing (ex. pamphlets, tv spots, billboards) are driving visitors to your site. Users going to your site by typing out links or scanning QR codes all count as direct traffic, so if you see a sudden bump in numbers during an offline marketing push, that could be a sign things are going well.

We say this might be the case because unfortunately, direct traffic is a vague metric on its own: it doesn’t really come with baked-in tags like “pamphlet visitors” or “billboard viewers”.

The Problem with Direct Traffic

As you can see, direct traffic is an opaque metric that can often bring about more questions than answers. It has the potential to tell you a lot about your marketing performance, but the limits of tools like Google Analytics make it hard to interpret on its own. 

Direct traffic is an aggregate metric that doesn’t come with the option to drill down and look at where the traffic is coming from. This isn’t Google’s fault: there’s no way to tell if someone typed a URL down because they remembered it, or because they have a business card right in front of them.

That is, unless you’re working with a tool like TinyURL.

Get More Value Out of Direct Traffic with TinyURL

For the average user, TinyURL is simply a URL shortening service: take a long, ugly link and shorten it to something easier on the eyes. For marketers and entrepreneurs, there’s another layer to our service that can address the problems of direct traffic.

Track Offline Marketing with Campaign-Specific URLs

We track clicks and other useful metrics for every TinyURL link made using our service—even if two distinct links lead to the same web page.

This has very cool applications for traditional marketing: you can design a single landing page for all your offline marketing, and shorten a URL for each platform where you’ll be distributing it.

1. Your billboards could tell viewers to visit examp.le/billboard

2. Your ad in an in-flight magazine could tell readers to visit examp.le/happy-travels

3. Your SMS ads could tell recipients to visit examp.le/sms-offer

Since each tiny URL in the above example would be unique and exclusive to the platforms mentioned, you can see precisely how well each marketing channel is doing through traffic for each distinct link, untangling it from the otherwise vague “direct traffic” category.

TinyURL’s link management feature lets you organize and group links using custom tags. All three of the above examples could be tagged under campaigns to let you view how the campaign went as a whole, and you could tag the third link with SMS if you wanted to see how it performs against your other SMS tactics. The sky’s the limit.

Conveniently Measure Direct Traffic from Emails

Email marketing is another popular strategy that can deliver high returns. Frustratingly, Google Analytics tags email redirects as direct traffic. 

You could turn to your email service provider (ex. MailChimp) to see how many users clicked on your emails, but that adds another platform and analytics dashboard to the tools you’re working with.

Using the same method of creating custom URLs that we mentioned above, TinyURL offers the convenience of tracking your traffic sources from a single dashboard. Just set up a TinyURL link for your email marketing blasts, and you can track how much of your traffic is coming from email marketing, SEO, and other sources.

If you run all your hyperlinks through TinyURL, you can focus on the platforms, blog articles, or ads that matter most to your business and keep a closer eye on them—and this includes links on your marketing emails.

Conclusion: TinyURL Makes Direct Traffic More Useful

TinyURL can solve the problem of direct traffic with shortened URLs that also tell you where your site visitors are coming from. Creating snappy and memorable URLs for your marketing campaigns is easy, and your links will never expire. Our streamlined analytics dashboard puts the traffic information you need for your marketing analytics within easy reach so you can go straight to the analysis without the hassle of digging up the numbers. 

Sign up for a TinyURL Pro account and never have to go through the mental gymnastics of interpreting direct traffic again!