This Google Analytics groups website traffic into broad traffic sources. For many websites “Direct / none” is the largest source of traffic in their reports. “Direct / none” is supposed to mean that this is “direct traffic” meaning visitors typed in the URL in the browser or used a bookmark to access the website.

Many marketers don’t realise that a large amount of direct traffic is normally no the result of many “direct visitors” but rather the result of visits where the referral information is not passed on to Google Analytics. If you send out regular newsletters to an email list and your visitors click a website link, the referral information is often not passed on from the email provider. As a result the majority of your email traffic could be classified as “Direct / none” even though this is not the case.

In order to be able to make the best possible marketing decisions, you want to make sure that all of your traffic sources are picked up accurately in Google Analytics.

Step 1: Analyse your ratio of direct traffic

Google Analytics -> Acquisition -> All Traffic -> Source/Medium

The report below shows all traffic sources including “Direct / none”. In this example the ratio of direct traffic is around 18% which is lower than most websites. This is the result of implementing Google Analytics tracking links whenever possible (next step).

Step 2: Using Google Analytics tracking links for traffic attribution

Google has a tool called URL builder. Here’s the link: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1033867?hl=en.

The tool allows you to build custom tracking links for all of your different marketing channels (for example email, social and ad campaigns other than AdWords).

Let’s say you want to send out a “February Promotion” to your newsletter subscribers. If you just link straight to your website without a tracking link a lot of the traffic would be recorded as “Direct / none” which doesn’t allow you to analyse the performance of your email campaigns.

Instead you should use the URL builder to setup a tracking link as follows:

– Website URL: the website URL or landing page URL where you want to send visitors
– Campaign Source: In this case “newsletter” but you can choose whatever you want (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Bing etc.)
– Campaign Medium: This should describe the type of traffic, in this case “email”. You could use “cpc” (cost per click) for ad campaigns or “social” for your social media platforms.
– Campaign Term and Campaign Content are optional
– Campaign Name: use a descriptive name that you will recognise later when it shows up in your Google Analytics reports, in this case I used “feb2015-promotion”

Once you are done, click on “Submit” to generate the link. Then just copy the link and use it in your newsletter.

Here’s how Google Analytics will pick up the traffic from this link:

Google Analytics -> Acquisition -> All Traffic -> Source / Medium

As you can see in the screenshot below, the traffic source shows as “newsletter / email”.

Google Analytics -> Acquisition -> Campaigns -> All Campaigns

In the report below, the traffic source shows as our previously defined campaign name “feb2015-promotion”. By using descriptive campaign names you can easily identify your campaigns later.