Direct Traffic
Visits with no referrer information: someone typing the address, using a bookmark, or arriving from a source that failed to pass attribution.
Analogy Mental model
Regulars who could find the shop blindfolded, mixed in with a crowd of strangers who refuse to say who sent them.
In practice What you actually do
A slowly rising direct line usually means brand recognition is growing, which is a genuine win. When it jumps sharply, investigate before celebrating, because the cause is often attribution loss rather than new demand.
Where people get burned Pitfalls
Most direct traffic is not typed. Clicks from messaging apps, PDFs, secure-to-insecure transitions, untagged email, and AI chat interfaces all lose their referrer and land in this bucket, which is why it so often spikes for reasons nobody can explain.
This entry was written in English from the Chinese original, not machine-translated. Read the Chinese version →