What is direct traffic in real time?

Direct traffic captures all traffic without any referrer - source and medium - attached to the view of the content. This includes, but is not limited to:

  • a view on a website-page, opened from within an app like Whatsapp or another app and no referrer (or UTM-tags) are presented
  • a view on a website-page, via a redirect-link on which the referrer was dropped or was never there
  • a view on a website-page, linked from another website where the referrer was explicitly blocked

We encourage you to define as many sources as you can and minimize the direct traffic. A common example is traffic from the newsletter. It happens often that links in emails don't contain UTM-tags. Therefore in many cases no referrer is known and the impact can't be measured.

Get started with our practical guide to using utm tags.