BizSugar.com › Online Marketing › SEO Matters: Up to 60% of Direct Traffic is really Organic Search

It can be difficult to realize the full value of SEO efforts on your website. A new experiment over at Groupon sheds light on one aspect of where your SEO analytics may be hiding – in the Direct search category. On their own site, Groupon found that 60% of “direct” traffic is actually organic search (ie. using regular old Google search to find sites). This experiment shows that the value of your SEO traffic channel may be significantly understated.

In analytics, the direct search traffic channel lumps people together when it doesn’t know where the traffic came from – this could be caused by privacy settings, cookie issues, or differences in how browsers report traffic. For Direct traffic they assume users typed in the URL or clicked a bookmark, but many times, that may not be the case.