#also google maps and mobile data. without those things i would be stuck in the middle of nowhere without hope of escape

[robinsnest2111]

anyway, at first I was afraid of biking through shitty terrain through the countryside, literally on sandy/littered with huge rocks dirt paths through dark fields in the middle of the night.

but I listened to Steel Panther's Feel the Steel album and sang along SO LOUD because it's the middle of the night in the middle of nowhere. was so freeing tbh. wanna do that again 🙏

[mohammedalagha]

The Complete Guide to Direct Traffic in Google Analytics

Posted by tombennet

When it comes to direct traffic in Analytics, there are two deeply entrenched misconceptions.

The first is that it’s caused almost exclusively by users typing an address into their browser (or clicking on a bookmark). The second is that it’s a Bad Thing, not because it has any overt negative impact on your site’s performance, but rather because it’s somehow immune to further analysis. The prevailing attitude amongst digital marketers is that direct traffic is an unavoidable inconvenience; as a result, discussion of direct is typically limited to ways of attributing it to other channels, or side-stepping the issues associated with it.

In this article, we’ll be taking a fresh look at direct traffic in modern Google Analytics. As well as exploring the myriad ways in which referrer data can be lost, we’ll look at some tools and tactics you can start using immediately to reduce levels of direct traffic in your reports. Finally, we’ll discover how advanced analysis and segmentation can unlock the mysteries of direct traffic and shed light on what might actually be your most valuable users.

What is direct traffic?

In short, Google Analytics will report a traffic source of "direct" when it has no data on how the session arrived at your website, or when the referring source has been configured to be ignored. You can think of direct as GA’s fall-back option for when its processing logic has failed to attribute a session to a particular source.

To properly understand the causes and fixes for direct traffic, it’s important to understand exactly how GA processes traffic sources. The following flow-chart illustrates how sessions are bucketed — note that direct sits right at the end as a final "catch-all" group.

Broadly speaking, and disregarding user-configured overrides, GA’s processing follows this sequence of checks:

AdWords parameters > Campaign overrides > UTM campaign parameters > Referred by a search engine > Referred by another website > Previous campaign within timeout period > Direct

Note the penultimate processing step (previous campaign within timeout), which has a significant impact on the direct channel. Consider a user who discovers your site via organic search, then returns via direct a week later. Both sessions would be attributed to organic search. In fact, campaign data persists for up to six months by default. The key point here is that Google Analytics is already trying to minimize the impact of direct traffic for you.

What causes direct traffic?

Contrary to popular belief, there are actually many reasons why a session might be missing campaign and traffic source data. Here we will run through some of the most common.

1. Manual address entry and bookmarks

The classic direct-traffic scenario, this one is largely unavoidable. If a user types a URL into their browser’s address bar or clicks on a browser bookmark, that session will appear as direct traffic.

Simple as that.

2. HTTPS > HTTP

When a user follows a link on a secure (HTTPS) page to a non-secure (HTTP) page, no referrer data is passed, meaning the session appears as direct traffic instead of as a referral. Note that this is intended behavior. It’s part of how the secure protocol was designed, and it does not affect other scenarios: HTTP to HTTP, HTTPS to HTTPS, and even HTTP to HTTPS all pass referrer data.

So, if your referral traffic has tanked but direct has spiked, it could be that one of your major referrers has migrated to HTTPS. The inverse is also true: If you’ve migrated to HTTPS and are linking to HTTP websites, the traffic you’re driving to them will appear in their Analytics as direct.

If your referrers have moved to HTTPS and you’re stuck on HTTP, you really ought to consider migrating to HTTPS. Doing so (and updating your backlinks to point to HTTPS URLs) will bring back any referrer data which is being stripped from cross-protocol traffic. SSL certificates can now be obtained for free thanks to automated authorities like LetsEncrypt, but that’s not to say you should neglect to explore the potentially-significant SEO implications of site migrations. Remember, HTTPS and HTTP/2 are the future of the web.

If, on the other hand, you’ve already migrated to HTTPS and are concerned about your users appearing to partner websites as direct traffic, you can implement the meta referrer tag. Cyrus Shepard has written about this on Moz before, so I won’t delve into it now. Suffice to say, it’s a way of telling browsers to pass some referrer data to non-secure sites, and can be implemented as a <meta> element or HTTP header.

3. Missing or broken tracking code

Let’s say you’ve launched a new landing page template and forgotten to include the GA tracking code. Or, to use a scenario I’m encountering more and more frequently, imagine your GTM container is a horrible mess of poorly configured triggers, and your tracking code is simply failing to fire.

Users land on this page without tracking code. They click on a link to a deeper page which does have tracking code. From GA’s perspective, the first hit of the session is the second page visited, meaning that the referrer appears as your own website (i.e. a self-referral). If your domain is on the referral exclusion list (as per default configuration), the session is bucketed as direct. This will happen even if the first URL is tagged with UTM campaign parameters.

As a short-term fix, you can try to repair the damage by simply adding the missing tracking code. To prevent it happening again, carry out a thorough Analytics audit, move to a GTM-based tracking implementation, and promote a culture of data-driven marketing.

4. Improper redirection

This is an easy one. Don’t use meta refreshes or JavaScript-based redirects — these can wipe or replace referrer data, leading to direct traffic in Analytics. You should also be meticulous with your server-side redirects, and — as is often recommended by SEOs — audit your redirect file frequently. Complex chains are more likely to result in a loss of referrer data, and you run the risk of UTM parameters getting stripped out.

Once again, control what you can: use carefully mapped (i.e. non-chained) code 301 server-side redirects to preserve referrer data wherever possible.

5. Non-web documents

Links in Microsoft Word documents, slide decks, or PDFs do not pass referrer information. By default, users who click these links will appear in your reports as direct traffic. Clicks from native mobile apps (particularly those with embedded "in-app" browsers) are similarly prone to stripping out referrer data.

To a degree, this is unavoidable. Much like so-called “dark social” visits (discussed in detail below), non-web links will inevitably result in some quantity of direct traffic. However, you also have an opportunity here to control the controllables.

If you publish whitepapers or offer downloadable PDF guides, for example, you should be tagging the embedded hyperlinks with UTM campaign parameters. You’d never even contemplate launching an email marketing campaign without campaign tracking (I hope), so why would you distribute any other kind of freebie without similarly tracking its success? In some ways this is even more important, since these kinds of downloadables often have a longevity not seen in a single email campaign. Here’s an example of a properly tagged URL which we would embed as a link:

http://ift.tt/2ifQkVi?..._medium=offline_document&utm_campaign=201711_utm_whitepaper

The same goes for URLs in your offline marketing materials. For major campaigns it’s common practice to select a short, memorable URL (e.g. moz.com/tv/) and design an entirely new landing page. It’s possible to bypass page creation altogether: simply redirect the vanity URL to an existing page URL which is properly tagged with UTM parameters.

So, whether you tag your URLs directly, use redirected vanity URLs, or — if you think UTM parameters are ugly — opt for some crazy-ass hash-fragment solution with GTM (read more here), the takeaway is the same: use campaign parameters wherever it’s appropriate to do so.

6. “Dark social”

This is a big one, and probably the least well understood by marketers.

The term “dark social” was first coined back in 2012 by Alexis Madrigal in an article for The Atlantic. Essentially it refers to methods of social sharing which cannot easily be attributed to a particular source, like email, instant messaging, Skype, WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger.

Recent studies have found that upwards of 80% of consumers’ outbound sharing from publishers’ and marketers’ websites now occurs via these private channels. In terms of numbers of active users, messaging apps are outpacing social networking apps. All the activity driven by these thriving platforms is typically bucketed as direct traffic by web analytics software.

People who use the ambiguous phrase “social media marketing” are typically referring to advertising: you broadcast your message and hope people will listen. Even if you overcome consumer indifference with a well-targeted campaign, any subsequent interactions are affected by their very public nature. The privacy of dark social, by contrast, represents a potential goldmine of intimate, targeted, and relevant interactions with high conversion potential. Nebulous and difficult-to-track though it may be, dark social has the potential to let marketers tap into elusive power of word of mouth.

So, how can we minimize the amount of dark social traffic which is bucketed under direct? The unfortunate truth is that there is no magic bullet: proper attribution of dark social requires rigorous campaign tracking. The optimal approach will vary greatly based on your industry, audience, proposition, and so on. For many websites, however, a good first step is to provide convenient and properly configured sharing buttons for private platforms like email, WhatsApp, and Slack, thereby ensuring that users share URLs appended with UTM parameters (or vanity/shortened URLs which redirect to the same). This will go some way towards shining a light on part of your dark social traffic.

Checklist: Minimizing direct traffic

To summarize what we’ve already discussed, here are the steps you can take to minimize the level of unnecessary direct traffic in your reports:

Migrate to HTTPS: Not only is the secure protocol your gateway to HTTP/2 and the future of the web, it will also have an enormously positive effect on your ability to track referral traffic.

Manage your use of redirects: Avoid chains and eliminate client-side redirection in favour of carefully-mapped, single-hop, server-side 301s. If you use vanity URLs to redirect to pages with UTM parameters, be meticulous.

Get really good at campaign tagging: Even amongst data-driven marketers I encounter the belief that UTM begins and ends with switching on automatic tagging in your email marketing software. Others go to the other extreme, doing silly things like tagging internal links. Control what you can, and your ability to carry out meaningful attribution will markedly improve.

Conduct an Analytics audit: Data integrity is vital, so consider this essential when assessing the success of your marketing. It’s not simply a case of checking for missing track code: good audits involve a review of your measurement plan and rigorous testing at page and property-level.

Adhere to these principles, and it’s often possible to achieve a dramatic reduction in the level of direct traffic reported in Analytics. The following example involved an HTTPS migration, GTM migration (as part of an Analytics review), and an overhaul of internal campaign tracking processes over the course of about 6 months:

But the saga of direct traffic doesn’t end there! Once this channel is “clean” — that is, once you’ve minimized the number of avoidable pollutants — what remains might actually be one of your most valuable traffic segments.

Analyze! Or: why direct traffic can actually be pretty cool

For reasons we’ve already discussed, traffic from bookmarks and dark social is an enormously valuable segment to analyze. These are likely to be some of your most loyal and engaged users, and it’s not uncommon to see a notably higher conversion rate for a clean direct channel compared to the site average. You should make the effort to get to know them.

The number of potential avenues to explore is infinite, but here are some good starting points:

Build meaningful custom segments, defining a subset of your direct traffic based on their landing page, location, device, repeat visit or purchase behavior, or even enhanced e-commerce interactions.

Track meaningful engagement metrics using modern GTM triggers such as element visibility and native scroll tracking. Measure how your direct users are using and viewing your content.

Watch for correlations with your other marketing activities, and use it as an opportunity to refine your tagging practices and segment definitions. Create a custom alert which watches for spikes in direct traffic.

Familiarize yourself with flow reports to get an understanding of how your direct traffic is converting. By using Goal Flow and Behavior Flow reports with segmentation, it’s often possible to glean actionable insights which can be applied to the site as a whole.

Ask your users for help! If you’ve isolated a valuable segment of traffic which eludes deeper analysis, add a button to the page offering visitors a free downloadable ebook if they tell you how they discovered your page.

Start thinking about lifetime value, if you haven’t already — overhauling your attribution model or implementing User ID are good steps towards overcoming the indifference or frustration felt by marketers towards direct traffic.

I hope this guide has been useful. With any luck, you arrived looking for ways to reduce the level of direct traffic in your reports, and left with some new ideas for how to better analyze this valuable segment of users.

Thanks for reading!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

[efosa123]

HUSTLE Is Investing When You Have NO MONEY – Gary Vaynerchuk 2018 | Motivational Speech hey Gary good afternoon good afternoon I'm Holly and I'm one of these old women in the room okay over 50 respect you look great thank you and reinventing I launched my sword out good for you and what would be the biggest piece of advice about reinventing cuz I've been here I've done it helped to that lot successfully they're doing well good on to the third yep Healthcare okay well what are you trying to accomplish reinvent when you say we embed yourself try to get street cred and notoriety and like yeah I've always played the field of personal finance I say the considered one of Canada's leading personal finance writers so here's what I would say and this you know I went through this when I kind of transitioned from wine to like more business content I didn't think a lot about established myself I thought a lot about doing investing in Facebook and Twitter and Tumblr early on building vaynermedia from zero to 200 million that was my reinvent it don't worry about what the fuck they think go and execute a successful launch and then you will be that it's the same thing with names do you know many people here fucking spend weeks coming up with their company name like - years I pick a month yeah that's a dumb fucking move here's why name's army you think McDonough Tim fucking Hortons is a great name names are made Google's not a great name snapchats not a great name these are just they become great names because of the actions not because the me Gary fucking V with too silent ease or he's fucking so make it the execution don't worry about establishing yourself the results always fucking speak let's take one from this side of the room yeah hey Gary how you doing my name is Sheldon Bruce from two-line music art and I've been following you about the past year Thank You Shelly you definitely changed my life that's last week I got my first three thousand dollar check because of you thank you alright what I want to ask you is what is your take on hustle versus investor I believe in both I don't think they're conflicting right I think Hustle is investing when you don't have money okay like your money or your time like you know and so like I think that both are essential I love investing financially I love investing in people I love investing in my audience which is why I put out my concept for free right I think investing is just smart it feels good and more importantly shot I started this talk with it which is unless like look I leave a lot of economics on the table every year now if I die tomorrow from a business standpoint I left something on the table but for the most part if I don't it will pay its dividends over the course of a 50-year career I show that you and every single person here has never met anybody who's been successful without them working hard and hustling you may know somebody who has a lot of money right that they were given that money but nobody here has achieved without a lot of hard work hard work is a prerequisite like yes the smarter you work the bigger the upside talent matters but to me Hustle is oxygen because it's the one piece of advice I can give to every single person here and it doesn't matter how good smart or clever or what they see is it is a variable of success so I'll big believer both those thank you thank you thank you be on my podcast all right a hundred percent done I'll do it Thank You Jerry this is crazy my birthday right now and I didn't thank you I don't know if I were talking 41st birthday no 23 it's actually on Thursday thanks on thank you to all the gens the Jensen was out here too for a kind of Nick Deborah Ella but I'm just I just wanted to ask you a quick question I so I just partnered up with my buddy we're doing a hockey apparel company called justice and hockey were based out of Buffalo New York okay my question to you is so we're big on or big on for online shopping right now of course my question for you is how can we increase our conversion rates well have better product okay I mean that's you know a lot of people don't think about that right because they only think about you know conversion rate has a lot to do with what's happening once they're there right right so either your landing page your UI your UX the copy the images are not grabbing people right the other way you can do it is by building brand right so there's sales and brand but these get into the like finite details I would scrutinize very heavily the shopping cart experience where the drop-off is this is all math you know like where where the buttons are have your baby tested the color of the Add to Cart button a lot of technical stuff and then comma are you building brand because people convert better when they trust will feel emotion so if they've heard of you on Instagram or on a podcast or things of that nature they'll feel more confidence once they get to that moment of truth so it's about black and white technical nuances of a website you know mobile optimization things of that nature and number two really are you establishing a brand that becomes trusted or loved Gary how do you balance between the you know not getting too stuck in the my new details of the green or red button like where's the balance between the data and then playing off the emotion for me I don't get stuff because if you become too mapped out you become commoditized there's a lot of people here and they're great at math they believe only in analytics and quant and it gets them to a certain place because it's an absolute strength but it's also the same reason they tap out cuz the math always plays out if math was the variable the game would be over by now the art matters so incredible and so for me I intuitively understand the art quite well and I surround myself with the biggest fucking nerds I could find on the map those are two variables you have hey just one more question so fast can I give you my business card sure you wanna loosen up I won't look at it that way what's that I will definitely throw out your business card at the airport okay that's fine but you can tweet me and be like I'm the 23 year old birthday boy who's got the website and that gives you a 13% chance I'll look at

[faizrashis1995]

5 Steps to Learning Python the Right Way

1. Figure Out What Motivates You to Learn Python

Before you start diving into learning Python online, it’s worth asking yourself why you want to learn it. This is because it’s going to be a long and sometimes painful journey. Without enough motivation, you probably won’t make it through. Make no mistake, even when you skip the “cliff of boring,” learning Python is still challenging.

 Plus, motivation matters! I slept through high school and college programming classes when I had to memorize syntax and I wasn’t motivated. On the other hand, when I needed to use Python to build a website to automatically score essays, I stayed up nights studying to finish it.

 In other words: it’s much easier to learn something when you have a reason to learn.

 Figuring out what motivates you will help you figure out an end goal, and a path that gets you there without boredom. You don’t have to figure out an exact project, just a general area you’re interested in as you prepare to learn Python.

 Pick an area you’re interested in, such as:

 Data science / Machine learning

Mobile apps

Websites

Games

Hardware / Sensors / Robots

Scripts to automate your work

  Yes, you can make robots using Python! From the Raspberry Pi Cookbook.

 Figure out one or two areas that interest you, and that you’re willing to stick with. You’ll be gearing your learning towards them, and eventually will be building projects in those areas, so choose things you’re actually interested in.

 2. Learn the Basic Syntax

Unfortunately, this step can’t be skipped. You have to learn the very basics of Python syntax before you dive deeper into your chosen area. You want to spend as little time as possible on this, as it isn’t very motivating. I personally made it about 30% into the Codecademy Python tutorials, which was enough.

 Here are some good resources to help you learn the basics:

 Codeacademy — does a good job of teaching basic syntax, and builds on itself well.

Learn Python the Hard Way — a book that teaches Python concepts from the basics to more in-depth programs.

Dataquest – Python Programming Fundamentals — I started Dataquest to make learning Python and data science easier. Dataquest teaches Python syntax in the context of learning data science. For example, you’ll learn about for loops while analyzing weather data. This course, and our intermediate Python course, are both free. We also have a lot of free Python tutorials.

The Python Tutorial — the tutorial on the main Python site.

I can’t emphasize enough that you should only spend the minimum amount of time possible on basic syntax. The quicker you can get to working on projects, the faster you will learn. You can always refer back to the syntax when you get stuck later. You should ideally only spend a couple of weeks on this phase, and definitely no more than a month.

 3. Make Structured Projects

Once you’ve learned the basic syntax, it’s possible to start making projects on your own. Projects are a great way to learn, because they let you apply your knowledge. Unless you apply your knowledge, it will be hard to retain it. Projects will push your capabilities, help you learn new things, and help you build a portfolio to show to potential employers.

 However, very freeform projects at this point will be painful — you’ll get stuck a lot, and need to refer to documentation. Because of this, it’s usually better to make more structured projects until you feel comfortable enough to make projects completely on your own. Many learning resources offer structured projects, and these projects let you build interesting things in the areas you care about while still preventing you from getting stuck.

 If you’re interested in learning Python for data science, each of our data science courses ends with a structured guided project that helps you apply your new skills creatively without totally dropping you into the deep end.

 But you may be interested in Python because you want to make a game, or work in robotics, or do something else, so let’s take a look at some other great resources for finding structured projects you can dig into:

 Data Science / Machine Learning

Dataquest — As mentioned previously, our courses teach interactively by asking you to write real code to analyze real-world data, and each course ends with a guided project.

Python for Data Analysis — A book written by the author of a major Python data analysis library, it’s a good introduction to analyzing data in Python, and it will help you learn some of the skills you’ll need for building data science projects.

Scikit-learn documentation — Scikit-learn is the main Python machine learning library. It has some great documentation and tutorials you can work through to get a feel for how it’s used.

CS109 — A Harvard class that teaches Python for data science. They have some of their projects and other materials online, and you can give them a try even if you’re not enrolled in the course.

Building Mobile Apps

Kivy guide — Kivy is a tool that lets you make mobile apps with Python. They have a guide on how to get started.

Websites

Flask tutorial — Flask is a popular web framework for Python. This is the introductory tutorial.

Bottle tutorial — Bottle is another web framework for Python. This is how to get started with it.

How To Tango With Django — A guide to using Django, a complex Python web framework.

Games

Codecademy — Has ineractive lessons that walk you through making a couple of simple games.

Pygame tutorials — Pygame is a popular Python library for making games, and this is a list of tutorials for it.

Making games with Pygame — A book that teaches you how to make games in Python.

Invent your own computer games with Python — Another book that walks you through how to make several games using Python.

  An example of a game you can make with Pygame. This is Barbie Seahorse Adventures 1.0, by Phil Hassey.

 Hardware / Sensors / Robots

Using Python with Arduino — Learn how to use Python to control sensors connected to an Arduino.

Learning Python with Raspberry Pi — Build hardware projects using Python and a Raspberry Pi. The sky is really the limit here, but this page will give you some ideas for places to start.

Learning Robotics using Python — A book that will help you learn how to build robots using Python.

Raspberry Pi Cookbook — Another book that’s focused on helping your learn how to build robots using a Raspberry Pi and Python.

Scripts to Automate Your Work

Automate the Boring Stuff with Python — A classic Python book that will help you learn how to automate everyday tasks using Python.

Once you’ve done a few structured projects in your own area, you should be able to move into working on your own totally unique projects. And because you’ll have been experimenting and working in your area of interest as you worked through those structured projects, you’ll probably have some cool ideas. But, before you dive completely into a passion project, it’s important to spend some time learning how to solve problems.

 4. Work on Projects on Your Own

Once you’ve completed some structured projects, it’s time to work on your own unique projects. On your journey to learn Python, it’s hard to know how much you’ve really learned until you step out and try to build something on your own. You’ll still be consulting resources and learning new concepts as you work, but you’ll be working on whatever you want to work on.

 Before you dive into working on your own projects, you should feel comfortable debugging errors and problems with your programs. Here are some resources that will help:

 StackOverflow — A community question and answer site where people discuss programming issues. You can find Python-specific questions here. You can ask your own questions if you need to, but often a search will reveal that someone else has already asked your question and gotten a good answer for it.

Google — Believe it or not, this is the most commonly used tool of every experienced programmer. Very useful when trying to resolve errors. Here’s an example.

Python’s official documentation — This is a good place to find reference material on Python.

Once you have a solid handle on debugging issues, you it’s time to dive into your own projects. Work on things that interest you. For example, I was interested in the idea of automated stock trading. That’s what motivated me, so I started working on tools to trade stocks automatically very soon after I learned the basics of Python programming.

 Here are some tips for finding interesting projects:

 Extend the projects you were working on previously, and add more functionality.

Go to Python meetups in your area, and find people who are working on interesting projects.

Find open source packages to contribute to.

See if any local nonprofits are looking for volunteer developers.

Find projects other people have made, and see if you can extend or adapt them. Github is a good place to find these.

Browse through other people’s blog posts to find interesting project ideas.

Think of tools that would make your every day life easier, and build them.

Remember to start very small. It’s often useful to start with things that are very simple so you can gain confidence. It’s better to start a small project you actually finish than a huge project that never gets done.

 It’s also useful to find other people to work with for more motivation.

 If you really can’t think of any good project ideas, here are some in each area we’ve discussed:

 Data Science / Machine Learning

A map that visualizes election data by state.

An algorithm that predicts the weather where you live.

A tool that predicts the stock market.

An algorithm that automatically summarizes news articles.

  You could make a more interactive version of this map. From RealClearPolitics.

 Mobile Apps

An app to track how far you walk every day.

An app that sends you weather notifications.

A realtime location-based chat app.

Websites

A site that helps you plan your weekly meals.

A site that allows users to review video games.

A note-taking platform.

Games

A location-based mobile game, where you capture territory.

A game where players must write code to solve puzzles.

Hardware / Sensors / Robots

Build sensors that monitor your house remotely (temperature, moisture, CO2 levels, etc).

Build a smarter alarm clock.

Create a self-driving robot that detects obstacles.

Scripts to Automate Your Work

A script to automate data entry.

A tool to scrape data from a website you frequent.

A script that reminds you to stand up once every hour.

The first project I built on my own was adapting my automated essay scoring algorithm from R to Python. It didn’t end up looking pretty, but it gave me a sense of accomplishment, and started me on the road to building my skills.

 Remeber, there aren’t really any wrong answers here. The key is just to pick something and do it. If you get too hung up on picking the perfect project, there’s a risk that you’ll never make one.

 5. Keep Working on Progressively Harder Projects

Once you’ve finished the first one, keep increasing the difficulty and scope of your projects. If you’re completely comfortable with what you’re building, that means it’s time to try something harder. That could mean starting a new and more difficult project, adding complexity to your current project, or taking on an entirely different sort of challenge.

 Here are some ideas for increasing the difficulty of your projects to ensure that you’re still progressing in your learning:

 Try teaching a novice how to build a project you made. Nothing forces you to really learn a subject quite like having to teach it

Can you scale up your tool? Can it work with more data, or can it handle more traffic?

Can you make your program run faster?

Can you make your tool useful for more people?

How would you commercialize what you’ve made?[Source]-https://www.dataquest.io/blog/learn-python-the-right-way/

 Advanced level Python Certification Course with 100% Job Assistance Guarantee Provided. We Have 3 Sessions Per Week And 90 Hours Certified Basic Python Classes In Thane Training Offered By Asterix Solution

[tak4hir0]

Most of the applications and sites we use today are bound to show location and various data on maps. Maps are used everywhere: from food delivery sites to online stores and complex applications for logistics companies. Maps are used very widely in web design, and when presenting data, we usually expect them to be interactive. It can be the branches of an international company, statistics about countries or just destinations to visualize. Maps that are pre-arranged help people find your business without having to spend time looking for your physical location manually. One way or another, while developing another application you will definitely face the questions of working with maps. What tools should you use? Paid or open-source? Standalone or web-based? Many different plugins and libraries that you will find on our list are built specifically to make it easy for people to find your business. But Google Maps isn’t the only solution. Firstly, it does not provide too many customization options, such as custom marking and adding extra widgets to make your maps more interactive. Other than that, you might need maps specifically for contests, exploration, traveling, hiking, and much more. That’s why you may need open-source solutions. In this article-comparison we will talk about different types of javascript tools for working with maps. We’ll look at the types of tools you can choose from, as well as the comparison options. Classification of javascript solution for maps Due to a large number of different tools for working with maps, it would be good to categorize them to give a definition of each category. In this article, the categories for Web mapping clients have been extracted from the projects’ descriptions. Thus, there are libraries, wrappers, toolkits, frameworks, and clients. Libraries: Expose classes and functions allowing to build applications at a higher level of programming;Wrappers: act as an interface between its caller and the wrapped code;Toolkits: more modular and easily integrated into a custom application;Frameworks: A reusable software template, or skeleton, from which key enabling and supporting services can be selected, configured and integrated with application code;Clients: ready-to-use Web mapping applications.This way of categorizing Web mapping clients provides a first approach for distinguishing them, so you could select more easily. The comparison The comparison is presented in three parts to facilitate the reading: General description: Gives an introduction to each project.Technical features: Presents some technical data on each project.Links of interest: Includes a screenshot showing how the client looks like as well as links to useful pages and live demos.How to choose the right solution? So, which mapping framework should you choose? It depends on what features you need and how much you want to customize your map.  In this section, we will take 2 products as a base for questions on how to choose a tool for work with maps. These are Google Maps and Leaflet – the most popular tools that reflect the 2 types of solutions to the question of choosing a tool for working with maps.Most users will be well served by simply choosing one of these two. First of all, you need to start with a question – Do I Even Need A Mapping Framework? If you need something set up quickly, have no custom data and default map themes are OK for you – simply use an embedded map like the Bing one to the left. Google, Bing and others offer options to embed a map. Either of these choices (embedding or using a plugin) will meet only the most basic of mapping needs. If your use case fits within what they offer, then I encourage you to use them. When your mapping needs get more complex, you will need to switch to using an actual mapping framework. When you choose the tool for maps apart of the technical classification, you will have to choose from Paid or Open-source solutions. Both paid and open-source ones are good and reliable mapping frameworks and there are a lot of good things they can do. Choosing between the two types will require consideration of several factors. The Google Maps API is created and maintained by Google. All updates, improvements and rules regarding its use come from Google. All free tier implementations must be publicly available – intranet usage and maps behind a paywall require a premium plan. Leaflet is an Open Source project, like WordPress, and there are fewer restrictions on its use. You can use it behind a paywall or on an intranet, use it for unlimited map views (though your base map provider may have its own limitations), remove or customize the branding and more. Let’s move to the next question you will ask when choosing the solution for your business. Releases and Upgrades Since Google controls the Google Maps API, they determine the release schedule and when new features are added. They also determine when older versions of the code will be retired. For the most part it’s a good thing. It means most websites will be using the same version of the API and that developers using the Google Maps API will be familiar with exactly what options are available. With Leaflet, upgrades are more frequent and incremental, new releases are made as new features are available. The plugin updates are also independent of the map updates, so additional improvements may come through those channels too. Or, if you’ve got a Leaflet map you’re happy with, you can copy the map code to your own server and keep using an older version for as long as you want – you aren’t forced to upgrade. Support Options If you’re using the free tier of Google Maps, then you could check out their community support site. If you are a paid plan Google Maps API user, you will have other support options available to you, including a hotline you can call. For Leaflet, there is active community support on StackExchange, StackOverflow and on GitHub, where the project code is hosted. Tools and libraries for maps Some of these map tools can really reduce the amount of effort needed to produce interactive maps. Many of these tools allow you to implement all kinds of dynamic maps with just a few lines of code. Here are the JS libraries you can use to show special map markers, draw custom route lines or even show a dialog when you hover or click on certain points of the map. Personalize your maps in the style that you want – some of them can be styled with CSS – or customize your map to be as interactive as you like. The source of the map data, dependencies and licenses of each library have been included for your convenience. For this roundup, we have chosen some of the Best JavaScript Libraries for creating interactive maps for your web applications. The following libraries provide a myriad of functions and features that help developers to create complex maps easily and quickly. Leafletjs Web-site: https://leafletjs.com/ GitHub stars: 25807, https://github.com/Leaflet/Leaflet/ Pricing: Free Map Data Source: OpenStreetMap Dependencies: None License: BSD 2-Clause “Simplified” License Category: Library Examples/Demo/Gallery: https://leafletjs.com/examples.html Leaflet.js Leaflet is one of the best open-source JavaScript libraries for creating mobile-friendly interactive maps. It is relatively small with a ton of features, plugins, straightforward API, and it works across all browsers and platforms. Here are some Leaflet.js demos. Its basic library is fairly small, making Leaflet a great option for mobile applications or other situations in which load time or size is at a premium. It also has a ton of available plugins meaning you can add on just about any functionality available with a heftier mapping library. It is also supported by some of the leading companies in the world; GitHub, Flickr, Facebook, Etsy and many more. Because it’s an open-source project, community members are welcome to contribute to the repository and make it even greater than it already is. Leaflet also has a strong documentation project behind it, making it a good choice for beginners, and there are a number of community-contributed examples out there on the Internet for when you get stuck, as well as many examples on the project homepage. Openlayers Web-site: https://openlayers.org/ GitHub stars: 5517, https://github.com/openlayers/openlayers Pricing: Free Map Data Source: OpenStreetMap Dependencies: None License: 2-Clause BSD Category: Library Examples: https://openlayers.org/en/latest/examples/ Openlayers OpenLayers is a high-performance open-source JavaScript framework to build interactive maps using various mapping services. You can choose the map layer source using a tiled layer or vector layer from a number of map services. The product comes mobile-ready out of the box, suitable for building maps across devices and browsers. You can use CSS for a different look at your map. To implement the map on your web using OpenLayers, here’s a tutorial that will help. OpenLayers is also capable of rendering vector data from GeoJSON, TopoJSON, KML, GML and other geographic data formats. The documentation for OpenLayers is well organized and provides a lot of information for developers. A gallery on the OpenLayers website contains a large selection of live demos, and quite a few code samples are available on GitHub. You can find beautiful maps for your admin panel. Mapbox Web-site: https://www.mapbox.com/ GitHub stars: 4845, https://github.com/mapbox/mapbox-gl-js Pricing: Free, starts from $4 for 1000 loads Map Data Source: Mapbox Dependencies: None License: Mapbox copyright Category: Web Application Examples: https://docs.mapbox.com/mapbox-gl-js/examples/ Mapbox Mapbox is one of the most advanced mapping solutions on the web right now. It is built for developers by experienced developers themselves. It gives easy to use set of tools for creating beautiful web and mobile maps. It offers users full control over map styling (including background map) and has a lot of cool additional services such as satellite images and geocoding or directions. The Mapbox platform features textures, illustrations, custom markers, vector tiles, static maps, geocoding and more. Mapbox offers five plans, ranging from a free starter plan to a high-volume enterprise plan. The platform also features Mapbox Editor, an online editor that allows users to quickly build custom maps using their own data. Data can be imported from a spreadsheet file (CSV), GeoJSON, KML or GPX. The documentation is well-designed and easy to follow. Google Maps API Web-site: https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation GitHub stars: – Pricing: Free, starts from $14 for 14000 loads in static maps Map Data Source: Google Dependencies: None License: Google copyright Category: Web Application Examples: https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/javascript/examples Google Maps API Google Maps is a safe choice for anyone, whether an inexperienced webmaster or an advanced developer. It has been around for long enough to have established themselves as the leaders in mapping industry. To add to that, JavaScript API makes it easy to integrate Google Maps into any application, service or website you desire. Moreover, WordPress users will be able to find plenty of plugins to support Google Maps on their site, all of which use the API to deliver end result. You can find beautiful maps for your admin panel. Datamaps Web-site: https://datamaps.github.io/ GitHub stars: 3245, https://github.com/markmarkoh/datamaps Pricing: Free Map Data Source: D3.js Dependencies: D3.js and TopoJSON License: MIT License Category: Library Examples: https://datamaps.github.io/ Datamaps DataMaps – interactive maps for data visualizations bundled into a single Javascript file. It is SVG-based, can be scaled to any screen size and relies heavily on D3.js. It comes with ready-to-use maps for world map with countries, USA with states and a combined one. The map data is stored as JSON and any custom maps can be created by following the structure. Jvectormap Web-site: http://jvectormap.com/ GitHub stars: – Pricing: From $39 Map Data Source: jVectorMap Dependencies: jQuery License: GNU GPL, paid Category: Library Examples: http://jvectormap.com/examples/world-gdp/ jVectorMap jVectorMap is an open-source library for interactive maps that requires jQuery. jVectorMap has quite a small API reference and does not feature Documentation as we know it, but there is a concise Getting Started tutorial which is still very helpful. jVectorMap uses only native browser technologies like JavaScript, CSS, HTML, SVG or VML. No Flash or any other proprietary browser plug-in is required. This allows jVectorMap to work in all modern mobile browsers. Bing Maps Web-site: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/maps/choose-your-bing-maps-api GitHub stars: – Pricing: Free, custom (on request) Map Data Source: Bing Maps Dependencies: None License: Microsoft copyright Category: Web Application Examples: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/bingmaps/v8-web-control/index Bing Maps Microsoft Bing Maps is a very popular mapping platform. Microsoft is steadily working on adding new features and improvements to the Bing Maps Platform.  There is a nice AJAX Interactive SDK that provides feature samples and code snippets for developers building JavaScript applications. The Bing Maps platform provides multiple API options for applications including Web Control, a Windows Store apps control, a WPF control, REST Services, and Spatial Data Services. Amcharts Map Chart Web-site: http://www.amcharts.com/javascript-maps/ GitHub stars: – Pricing: Free, from $180 Map Data Source: amCharts Dependencies: None License: Amcharts copyright Category: Library Examples: https://www.amcharts.com/demos/#maps Ammap amMap is a special JavaScript (HTML5) library for maps developed by amCharts. It has no external dependencies and allows you to build beautiful choropleths, bubbles, dots (or points), connectors and flow maps quite easily, as well as supporting multiple utile interactive features. The tool can be used to show locations of offices, routes of journeys, create distributor map, etc. The product offers a number of features: it lets you use photos or images as layers and backgrounds, as well as highlight location and routes. Kartograph Web-site: http://kartograph.org/ GitHub stars: 1519, https://github.com/kartograph/kartograph.js Pricing: Free Map Data Source: Kartograph Dependencies: Kartograph.py, Raphael, and jQuery License: AGPL and LGPL Category: Framework Examples: http://kartograph.org/showcase/ Kartograph Kartograph is a simple and lightweight framework for generating SVG maps without any other mapping services. Kartograph.js is a JavaScript library for creating interactive maps based on Kartograph SVG maps. It is built on top of Raphael and jQuery and it gracefully degrades to Internet Explorer 7+. There is no ready-to-use map collection in Kartograph, but the library works with any SVG maps, also offering a utility named Kartograph.py to create maps. While Kartograph is not dependency-free requiring both Raphael JS (used for drawing) and jQuery, it provides you with smooth mapping experience, whereas the library documentation and API reference (combined in a single article) allow you to get interactive maps up and running in your projects in quite a nice and easy manner. ArcGIS Web-site: https://developers.arcgis.com/ GitHub stars: – Pricing: Free, from $125 monthly Map Data Source: Esri Dependencies: None License: Esri copyright Category: Framework Examples: https://developers.arcgis.com/javascript/3/jssamples/ ArcGIS ArcGIS API for JavaScript – a lightweight way to embed maps and tasks in web applications. It comes with a ton of features, samples, bundled widgets and templates. Here is a good ArcGIS Boilerplate. Esri has a really nice portal for developers that is well-designed and easy to follow. The developer portal includes access to ArcGIS APIs and SDKs, good documentation, live demos, code samples and more. Esri offers standalone developer pricing that uses a credit system (for developers who do not have an ArcGIS online subscription). Esri technology is used by more than 350,000 organizations worldwide, and over two-thirds of them are Fortune 500 companies. Zeemaps Web-site: https://www.zeemaps.com/ GitHub stars: – Pricing: Free, from $19.95 per month Map Data Source: – Dependencies: None License: Zeemaps copyright Category: Web Application Examples: https://www.zeemaps.com/mobile?group=1971477 ZeeMaps ZeeMaps is an enterprise-class mapping service that allows you to easily create, publish and share interactive maps. You can construct dynamic visualizations of geographic information, producing maps from your list of people or places. For example, you can create a map of places you have visited, or maps that mark the addresses of your customers, sales leads, friends and relatives. All maps are stored on their own servers and can be instantly accessed at any time, anywhere, from any standard Web browser on a computer or mobile device. All maps can be crowdsourced for additions. That makes it a very reliable platform to use between groups of people. Other features also include grids, icons, markers and custom fields. This is a tool that is tailored for specific types of interactive maps – it is wonderful at letting you create, publish and share maps for presentation or geoanalysis. It offers the kind of features that most others on the list do. In addition, it makes it easier for you to get inputs for the map from different sources and set up 3-level access for the maps. Anymap by Anychart Web-site: https://www.anychart.com/products/anymap/overview/ GitHub stars: – Pricing: From $79 Map Data Source: Anychart Dependencies: None License: Anycharts copyright Category: Library Examples: https://www.anychart.com/products/anymap/gallery/ AnyMap AnyMap is one of popular JavaScript (HTML5) charting libraries created by AnyChart. Just like amMap, it requires no big efforts to build a map using it as well as no external resources or third-party libraries such as jQuery. AnyMap also supports all basic types of maps you might need – choropleth, bubble, dot, connector and flow maps. The list of key interactive features of AnyMap includes drill-down for region-specific insights, events model for processing map viewer actions, and color scale for automatically coloring a map according to your settings instead of doing that manually. Highmaps by Highcharts Web-site: https://www.highcharts.com/products/highmaps/ GitHub stars: 8999, https://github.com/highcharts/highcharts Pricing: Free and paid (From $390) Map Data Source: Highcharts Dependencies: jQuery License: Highcharts copyright Category: Library Examples: https://www.highcharts.com/maps/demo HighMaps Highmaps library is the younger sister of Highcharts and Highstock, popular charting libraries developed by Norway’s Highsoft. Its core advantages are the open source nature with all its pros, light weight which ensures high rendering performance, and a vast set of interactive features such as drill down and others. Among the map types supported in Highmaps are choropleth and bubble maps. It is also possible to draw lines to depict a road, a river, or a connector. However, making flow maps is not as simple as with amMap or AnyMap, for example. It is also worth noting that neither Highcharts nor Highmaps can work without jQuery, so you must have this dependency if you want to use them or choose another charting library. A good thing is that Highmaps offer multiple ready-to-use maps in both SVG and GeoJSON. The documentation is quite extensive and is great at helping you understand the library’s settings quite quickly and easily. Cesium Web-site: https://cesiumjs.org/ GitHub stars: 4941, https://github.com/AnalyticalGraphicsInc/cesium Pricing: Free Map Data Source: Cesium Dependencies: None License: Apache License 2.0 Category: Library Examples: https://cesiumjs.org/demos/ Cesium Cesium, a WebGL-powered JavaScript mapping library, offers just that by being provider-agnostic. It has support for 3 different views: 3D globe, 2D map, and 2.5D Columbus View. It works across different platforms and different browsers: you don’t have to worry about compatibility. Polymaps Web-site: http://polymaps.org/ GitHub stars: 1533, https://github.com/simplegeo/polymaps Pricing: Free Map Data Source: OSM, Bing Dependencies: None License: SimpleGeo and Stamen copyright Category: Library Examples: http://polymaps.org/ex/ Polymaps Polymaps is a free JavaScript library for creating dynamic and interactive maps. Besides the usual cartography from OpenStreetMap, CloudMade, Bing, etc., it works with image-based and vector-tiled maps by providing a quick display of multi-zoom datasets over maps and supports a variety of visual presentations. Its main strength is making it very easy to composite raster and vector data from many different sources. It can meet all your requirements, particularly in letting you easily add your own coloring, grouping and interaction. Polymaps is also quite efficient: it runs quickly, it manages background tile loading well, and it’s only 30k of Javascript. The nice thing about using SVG (scalable vector graphics) for creating maps is that it means that many of the same styling options which can be applied to web documents with CSS will also work with your map design. As Polymaps can load data at a full range of scales, it’s a good fit for showing information from a country level on down to states, cities, neighborhoods and individual streets. Mapael Web-site: https://www.vincentbroute.fr/mapael/ GitHub stars: 922, https://github.com/neveldo/jQuery-Mapael Pricing: Free Map Data Source: Raphael.js Dependencies: jQuery License: MIT License Category: Library Examples: https://www.vincentbroute.fr/mapael/ Mapael jQuery Mapael allows you to create maps with elegant data visualization as well as interactivity. You can, for example, create a map and designate each region on the map with different colors based on region. You can also add tooltip on the region, as well as event handlers like click or hover. The map is built with SEO in mind by providing alternate content for search engine robots that are not capable of crawling JavaScript-generated content. Mapael offers a collection of maps on its own repository. Documentation and API descriptions are combined in one article, but despite this you can easily get started with this library just by reading this detailed tutorial. Conclusion According to Google Trends 3, the most popular tools for working with Maps are Leaflet, Google Maps API and Mapbox. You can see the big gap on search queries with Bing Maps API and Openlayers, these also being quite popular. Javascript Tools for mapping All the free libraries we mentioned do a good job of building interactive maps. All the APIs are capable of producing great online mapping systems, but your choice should also fit in with you or your company’s future development needs. For example, using any commercial API leaves you at the mercy of whatever changes the provider will make to the API or Terms of Service. On the other hand, using an open-source engine and the ability to switch providers anytime offers more freedom + flexibility, but it takes a lot of effort to build such systems. We believe in using the right tool for the job. Leaflet or the Google Maps API will work well for most use cases, but there are situations that call for other tools.  For non-GIS background developers creating single-function mapping apps we will recommend Leaflet (now supported by MapBox). It’s small and easy to use. More functionality relies on plugins of varying quality and support. Lastly, if your maps are more design and user interaction oriented, you might want to consider using D3, a JavaScript animation library that can also do some types of mapping. Thanks for reading this, and I do hope you find the article helpful. P.S. We have also prepared a comparison table for a better view.  LeafletjsOpenlayersMapboxGoogle Maps APIDatamapsJvectormapBing MapsAmcharts Map ChartKartographArcGISZeemapsAnymap by AnychartHighmaps by HighchartsCesiumPolymapsMapael Official Web-sitehttps://leafletjs.com/https://openlayers.org/https://www.mapbox.com/https://developers.google.com/maps/documentationhttps://datamaps.github.io/http://jvectormap.com/https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/maps/choose-your-bing-maps-apihttp://www.amcharts.com/javascript-maps/http://kartograph.org/https://developers.arcgis.com/https://www.zeemaps.com/https://www.anychart.com/products/anymap/overview/https://www.highcharts.com/products/highmaps/https://cesiumjs.org/http://polymaps.org/https://www.vincentbroute.fr/mapael/ GitHub stars25807, https://github.com/Leaflet/Leaflet/5517, https://github.com/openlayers/openlayers4845, https://github.com/mapbox/mapbox-gl-js-3245, https://github.com/markmarkoh/datamaps---1519, https://github.com/kartograph/kartograph.js---8999, https://github.com/highcharts/highcharts4941, https://github.com/AnalyticalGraphicsInc/cesium1533, https://github.com/simplegeo/polymaps922, https://github.com/neveldo/jQuery-Mapael PricingFreeFreeFree, starts from $4 for 1000 loadsFree, starts from $14 for 14000 loads in static mapsFreeFrom $39Free, custom (on request)Free, from $180FreeFree, from $125 monthlyFree, from $19.95 per monthFrom $79Free and paid (From $390)FreeFreeFree Map Data SourceOpenStreetMapOpenStreetMapMapboxGoogleD3.jsjVectorMapBing MapsamChartsKartographEsri-AnychartHighchartsCesiumOSM, BingRaphael.js DependenciesNoneNoneNoneNoneD3.js and TopoJSONjQueryNoneNoneKartograph.py, Raphael, and jQueryNoneNoneNonejQueryNoneNonejQuery LicenseBSD 2-Clause "Simplified" License2-Clause BSDMapbox copyrightGoogle copyrightMIT LicenseGNU GPL, paidMicrosoft copyrightAmcharts copyrightAGPL and LGPLEsri copyrightZeemaps copyrightAnycharts copyrightHighcharts copyrightApache License 2.0SimpleGeo and Stamen copyrightMIT License CategoryLibraryLibraryWeb ApplicationWeb ApplicationLibraryLibraryWeb ApplicationLibraryFrameworkFrameworkWeb ApplicationLibraryLibraryLibraryLibraryLibrary Examples/Demohttps://leafletjs.com/examples.htmlhttps://openlayers.org/en/latest/examples/https://docs.mapbox.com/mapbox-gl-js/examples/https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/javascript/exampleshttps://datamaps.github.io/http://jvectormap.com/examples/world-gdp/https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/bingmaps/v8-web-control/indexhttps://www.amcharts.com/demos/#mapshttp://kartograph.org/showcase/https://developers.arcgis.com/javascript/3/jssamples/https://www.zeemaps.com/mobile?group=1971477https://www.anychart.com/products/anymap/gallery/https://www.highcharts.com/maps/demohttps://cesiumjs.org/demos/http://polymaps.org/ex/https://www.vincentbroute.fr/mapael/ About Flatlogic At Flatlogic we develop admin dashboard templates and React Native templates. We are listed among Top 20 Web Development companies from Belarus and Lithuania. During the last 6 years, we have successfully completed more than 30 big projects for small startups and large enterprises. As a team, we always have a deep desire to help our clients. If you liked our blog, please read our latest posts:

[orangeoceanbird-blog]

12 Tips to Make International Travel Easier

They can be in a strange, stimulating and revealing place. Some of my favorite travel memories include one morning along the Danube in Budapest, a tour of the Angkor Wat temples, drinking drinks and late-night steaks in Uruguay.

There were also many business trips where the only places I saw were those visible from the window of my hotel room, because I was very busy running from one meeting to another.

No matter what type of trip you make, there are many steps you can take to facilitate your trip abroad. Here are 12 of my favorite international travel tips:

Hotel business cards. The first thing I do when I arrive at a hotel abroad is to get a business card from reception. In this way, if hit, gotta have the name and address of the hotel in the local language. A large number of people speak the English around the world, but having something in local language can show locals and taxi drivers is extra insurance.

Passport base for six months. The expiration date of your passport is actually a bit misleading. The United States allows you to use your passport so far on the cover. However, several countries will be denied entry to passengers if the passport expires in less than six months. Why? If you are stuck abroad for an unexpected reason longer than planned, you will want that state to ensure that you have a valid passport to travel in the end to the United States. To avoid any problem, always renew my passport during the inactivity period of the trip, ie almost nine months before the expiry date.

Getting cash The way to get cash is usually an ATM machine, but many US banks. They charge high fees for using ATMs outside the network. You can get large cash at the ATM at the airport, so pay only once, but it is never advisable to carry large amounts of cash. In addition, you face the risk of having a lot of local currency remaining at the end of your trip. Charles Schwab and Fidelity provide checking accounts that do not have a minimum balance requirement and pay all ATM fees, including fees from outside.

Read More: Best Place to visit on the international tour

Credit cards are often best to find the exchange rates using your credit card. However, many credit cards will add foreign transaction fees, sometimes up to 3 per cent. It is a useless rate that the traveler should not pay. Chase Sapphire Preferred and Platinum American Express are two non-chargeable ways. Also, you do not have a hotel or restaurant converting dollar fees first. It's a bad deal.

Fraud Alerts Report the fraud section of your credit card company to the country you are visiting and on what dates. That way, they will not think your card has been stolen and stopped only when you need it most. Consider the countries that may be changing aircraft. You may have to charge during your stop, especially if there is a delay.

Credit card chips. American Credit Cards. They are based on magnetic strips on their backs sliding into vendors. In Europe, cards contain a chip embedded in them, when combined with a PIN code, used for purchase. It is a safer way to collect goods, but it has not been adopted in the United States. Most overseas sellers can still pass their card. But ticketing machines, service stations and other devices where we pay without interacting with someone often refuse stolen cards. Get a chip and PIN card from a US bank Hard. But many credit cards now come with chip technology and signature.

Drug  I always wear an eye mask and earplugs in my medicine bag because you never know the shape of a hotel room. But I also carry Advil, Nice well, Imodium A-D, Toms and a handful of other major drugs. Yes, even the most historic European neighborhood has a pharmacy. But would you like to pass through Germany late at night, trying to translate "diarrhea"? If you go to third world countries, it is important to store appropriate medicines. Many travelers fill up a prescription for ciprofloxacin with antibiotics in advance and take them with them immediately.

Travel Alerts It is a good idea to check out travel warnings and alerts issued by the State Department. It is also smart to print the address and contact information of the local embassy.

Locations of foreign airlines. If you have a tight budget and do not need to book through your company's Travel section, check the locations of foreign airlines in your country of origin. I recently booked a ticket from southern Italy to northern Italy in Alitalia. Location of the United States airline UU. I wanted double the price of the Italian site. I do not speak Italian fluently, but Google Chrome has translated all the pages. I paid in euros using a credit card without transaction fees abroad.

Data roaming Configure your mobile phone to avoid roaming international data. Many business travelers have an international communication and data plan. But the rare travelers do not. High costs may come from data transfer. I was in a remote part of South San Diego last summer and my cell phone provider sent me a textural alert welcoming me in Mexico. Apparently, he had jumped into the cell tower in Tijuana. You've turned off Roaming data instantly, and only turn it on once when you're outside of this area.

Google Maps I have a great sense of direction and rarely need a map. However, I know that others are not very lucky and have become dependent on their mobile phones to navigate. If you do not add a data plan to your phone when you're abroad, you can still set up an approximate version. Using Wi-Fi at your hotel, plan out some of the routes you intend to walk that day. Then take a screenshot of those maps. Later, you can find the image, zoom and follow the path. It is not ideal, but it is an alternative solution.

Unwanted local currency. Last night, I deduct the amount I will need and then keep the remaining amount. When I leave the next morning, I take this money and ask the hotel to apply it to my bill, then pay the remaining balance with my credit card without foreign transaction fees

[clarenceomoore]

Disruptive Technologies: In Conversation with Byron Reese & Lauren Sallata

Byron Reese: Many people are excited about possibilities that today’s new technologies offer. They see a world made better through technology. Another group of people view the technology landscape completely differently and are concerned about the impact of technology on privacy, community, employment. Why is there so much disagreement, and where do you come down in your view of the future.

Lauren Sallata: In the words of Mohandas Gandhi, “Honest disagreement is often a good sign of progress.” You could say the same about disagreement over technology.  Panasonic is involved in engineering entirely new and better experiences, in cities and factories, in stores, offices, entertainment venues, and in automobiles, airports and on airplanes. Consultancy McKinsey identified 12 disruptive technologies that will account for trillions of dollars in economic value over the decade ahead. Panasonic is deeply engaged in 10 of those 12 technologies. And we see the positive impact of these technologies clearly already. For example, in renewable energy, our lithium-ion batteries are being used in the world’s leading electric vehicles to reduce pollution. Sensors embedded in road systems to send information to cars and road operators about hazardous conditions and traffic and use IoT to improve driving safety and reduce traffic jams. Other examples include wearable robotics designed to reduce injuries at work. 

How do you think the widespread adoption of IoT devices will change our daily lives?  What is Panasonic’s vision of a hyper-connected world look like? 

We see the “things” that make up the “Internet of Things” bringing us unparalleled data, information and convenience to change our in-home and working experiences. Voice technology will enable each interaction to be more personalized and seamless. We believe that voice is the technology that moves all other technologies forward. Why? Voice takes away the learning curve and gives both businesses and consumers more control over the way they use and interact with technology. Using our voices frees up our hands and our brains. When we pry our eyes away from screens, and stop tapping on keypads, we can focus on what we’re doing right now. The factory worker is less likely to make errors …the car driver is less distracted…the ER nurse can focus more completely on his patients. Voice is already an auto sector mainstay. We’ve developed cutting-edge, voice-activated Infotainment systems for many of the world’s top automakers, like our new ELS system for Acura.We’re working with Amazon to help us take voice integration beyond just information and move toward fully-realized contextual understanding. These capabilities are giving auto drivers and passengers control over critical features such as heating and ventilation systems and audio and navigation functions. We’re also giving passengers the benefit of connecting to other smart devices to allow them to fully control their experience both in and out of the car. We’re also working with Google on similar projects in the voice space, to provide integration and information throughout their technology solutions.

Talk about driverless cars for a minute.  When do you think we might see the end of the human driver? What is Panasonic’s role in building that world?

We’ve estimated by 2030, 15% of new cars sold could be fully autonomous. We work with almost all the major automakers around the world, have for almost 60 years, and are doubling down on our ADAS and automation technology investments with partners. Autonomous Vehicles are going to have a huge impact on our society. Vehicle Electrification is going to have a similar impact on our planet…The combination of the two technologies will create a multiplier effect that will remake transportation. This will happen in stages. Stage one is the emergence of the connected vehicle, which lays the foundation. With EVs, we’re still at a price premium to internal combustion. By around 2022, we’ll be at parity. During this time, we’ll see elements of autonomous driving, such as autonomous braking, and EV autonomous vehicles for commercial and fleet start to go mainstream.  Next, we see trucking fleets start to make the transition.  Then commercial ride sharing fleets come on-line, giving consumers the benefit of autonomous electric vehicle transportation. In the last stage, we’ll see the personal ownership market catch up with commercial.

Tell us about what’s going on at Highway I-70 in Colorado

As cars become more computer than machine, they are capable of communicating with one another in real time – saving time and lives. Panasonic has partnered with the Colorado Department of Transportation to create a connected vehicle ecosystem that promises to drive a revolution in roadway safety and efficiency. On a 90-mile commuter stretch of interstate 70 into Denver, this technology has been designed and will be deployed later this year to allow CDOT to share information on highway conditions, traffic alerts and other driving hazards. It’s the first production-grade, U.S. connected vehicle system in which real-time data would be shared across vehicles, infrastructure and people with a goal to improve safety, lower fuel consumption and reduce congestion. Estimates are that such a solution could reduce non-impaired traffic crashes by 80 percent and save drivers hours stuck in traffic each year.

What is Panasonic doing in the world of immersive entertainment? 

At iconic stadiums, beloved theme parks, and worldwide special events like the Olympic Games, Panasonic technologies immerse fans in the action and create storytelling experiences that inspire and amaze with the world’s largest video displays, mesmerizingly sharp content, sophisticated projection mapping, seamless mobile integration, and innovations like an augmented reality skybox that gives fans control of stats and replays, projecting them right on to the glass inside stadium suites – all without obstructing their view of the field. From racing through Radiator Springs at Disney California Adventure Theme Park to embarking on a frozen voyage through Arendelle in the Frozen Ever After attraction at Orlando’s Epcot, Panasonic’s technology has enhanced the experience for millions. Recently Panasonic collaborated with Disney creative teams on an amazing experience inside Pandora – The World of Avatar, at Disney’s Animal Kingdom. Its projection technology helped Disney bring the Na’vi River Journey attraction to life. Guests take a boating expedition down a mysterious river hidden within a bioluminescent rainforest, through a darkened network of caves illuminated by exotic glowing plants and amazing creatures that call Pandora home. The journey culminates in an encounter with a Na’vi Shaman of Songs, who has a deep connection to Pandora’s life force and sends positive energy out into the forest through her music. Disney wanted the two worlds to work seamlessly with one another, and Panasonic’s projection system allowed the attraction to achieve that seamless connection through projection imaging that provided perfect color rendition, precise levels of brightness, and robust systems. Today fans who use Instagram and rideshare as verbs expect the same mobile connectivity and convenience from their ballpark as they do from their Lyft. The Atlanta Braves franchise understands this well, and with help from Panasonic technology welcomes fans way before the opening pitch. Panasonic technologies at SunTrust Park and its adjacent mixed-use site, the Atlanta Battery, are all digitally connected, with more than 18 LED displays, monitors, projectors, digital signage kiosks, and video security systems – all regulated from one central control room. We just conducted a study of CTOs and senior tech decision makers on how companies are using or want to use disruptive technologies in areas such as retail, sports, media and entertainment. Our new study reveals that four technologies are at the top of their innovation agendas – artificial intelligence, robotics, 3-D printing and energy storage. Four out of five respondents are poised to adopt AI to gain customer insights and predict behavior.

And talk a bit about your solar initiatives.

Panasonic has been a leader in the solar energy space for over 40 years.  From electric vehicles to solar grids, Panasonic’s solutions are helping forward-thinking businesses and governments pursue a brighter, more eco-responsible future. To solve the world’s growing energy needs, Panasonic is developing high-efficiency solar panels that make eco more economical, planning entire eco-sustainable communities, using sensor technology to regulate energy usage in offices, and building energy storage systems that allow for more efficient energy consumption. When it comes to solar panel technology, revolutionary materials and system design have led Panasonic to record-setting efficiencies. Panasonic’s heterojunction (HIT®) technology has been designed with ultra-thin silicon layers that absorb and retain more sunlight, coupled with an ingenious bifacial cell design that captures light from both sides of the panel. By continuously innovating, we’re helping each generation of solar panel make better use of renewable resources, and offering the industry greater cost savings.

How do we make sure that the benefits of all these technologies extend to everyone on the planet?

Over the last 100 years Panasonic has taken pride in creating new and exciting solutions in many different realms.  By having expertise in so many strong areas, especially those identified as disruptive technologies, we hope to enhance the lives of as many people as possible.

Lauren Sallata is Chief Marketing Officer at Panasonic Corporation of North America, the principal North American subsidiary of Panasonic Corporation and the hub of Panasonic’s U.S. branding, marketing, sales, service and R&D operations. She leads the corporations digital, brand, content, and advertising efforts, as well as Corporate Communications.

[lawrenceseitz22]

The Complete Guide to Direct Traffic in Google Analytics

Posted by tombennet

When it comes to direct traffic in Analytics, there are two deeply entrenched misconceptions.

The first is that it’s caused almost exclusively by users typing an address into their browser (or clicking on a bookmark). The second is that it’s a Bad Thing, not because it has any overt negative impact on your site’s performance, but rather because it’s somehow immune to further analysis. The prevailing attitude amongst digital marketers is that direct traffic is an unavoidable inconvenience; as a result, discussion of direct is typically limited to ways of attributing it to other channels, or side-stepping the issues associated with it.

In this article, we’ll be taking a fresh look at direct traffic in modern Google Analytics. As well as exploring the myriad ways in which referrer data can be lost, we’ll look at some tools and tactics you can start using immediately to reduce levels of direct traffic in your reports. Finally, we’ll discover how advanced analysis and segmentation can unlock the mysteries of direct traffic and shed light on what might actually be your most valuable users.

What is direct traffic?

In short, Google Analytics will report a traffic source of "direct" when it has no data on how the session arrived at your website, or when the referring source has been configured to be ignored. You can think of direct as GA’s fall-back option for when its processing logic has failed to attribute a session to a particular source.

To properly understand the causes and fixes for direct traffic, it’s important to understand exactly how GA processes traffic sources. The following flow-chart illustrates how sessions are bucketed — note that direct sits right at the end as a final "catch-all" group.

Broadly speaking, and disregarding user-configured overrides, GA’s processing follows this sequence of checks:

AdWords parameters > Campaign overrides > UTM campaign parameters > Referred by a search engine > Referred by another website > Previous campaign within timeout period > Direct

Note the penultimate processing step (previous campaign within timeout), which has a significant impact on the direct channel. Consider a user who discovers your site via organic search, then returns via direct a week later. Both sessions would be attributed to organic search. In fact, campaign data persists for up to six months by default. The key point here is that Google Analytics is already trying to minimize the impact of direct traffic for you.

What causes direct traffic?

Contrary to popular belief, there are actually many reasons why a session might be missing campaign and traffic source data. Here we will run through some of the most common.

1. Manual address entry and bookmarks

The classic direct-traffic scenario, this one is largely unavoidable. If a user types a URL into their browser’s address bar or clicks on a browser bookmark, that session will appear as direct traffic.

Simple as that.

2. HTTPS > HTTP

When a user follows a link on a secure (HTTPS) page to a non-secure (HTTP) page, no referrer data is passed, meaning the session appears as direct traffic instead of as a referral. Note that this is intended behavior. It’s part of how the secure protocol was designed, and it does not affect other scenarios: HTTP to HTTP, HTTPS to HTTPS, and even HTTP to HTTPS all pass referrer data.

So, if your referral traffic has tanked but direct has spiked, it could be that one of your major referrers has migrated to HTTPS. The inverse is also true: If you’ve migrated to HTTPS and are linking to HTTP websites, the traffic you’re driving to them will appear in their Analytics as direct.

If your referrers have moved to HTTPS and you’re stuck on HTTP, you really ought to consider migrating to HTTPS. Doing so (and updating your backlinks to point to HTTPS URLs) will bring back any referrer data which is being stripped from cross-protocol traffic. SSL certificates can now be obtained for free thanks to automated authorities like LetsEncrypt, but that’s not to say you should neglect to explore the potentially-significant SEO implications of site migrations. Remember, HTTPS and HTTP/2 are the future of the web.

If, on the other hand, you’ve already migrated to HTTPS and are concerned about your users appearing to partner websites as direct traffic, you can implement the meta referrer tag. Cyrus Shepard has written about this on Moz before, so I won’t delve into it now. Suffice to say, it’s a way of telling browsers to pass some referrer data to non-secure sites, and can be implemented as a <meta> element or HTTP header.

3. Missing or broken tracking code

Let’s say you’ve launched a new landing page template and forgotten to include the GA tracking code. Or, to use a scenario I’m encountering more and more frequently, imagine your GTM container is a horrible mess of poorly configured triggers, and your tracking code is simply failing to fire.

Users land on this page without tracking code. They click on a link to a deeper page which does have tracking code. From GA’s perspective, the first hit of the session is the second page visited, meaning that the referrer appears as your own website (i.e. a self-referral). If your domain is on the referral exclusion list (as per default configuration), the session is bucketed as direct. This will happen even if the first URL is tagged with UTM campaign parameters.

As a short-term fix, you can try to repair the damage by simply adding the missing tracking code. To prevent it happening again, carry out a thorough Analytics audit, move to a GTM-based tracking implementation, and promote a culture of data-driven marketing.

4. Improper redirection

This is an easy one. Don’t use meta refreshes or JavaScript-based redirects — these can wipe or replace referrer data, leading to direct traffic in Analytics. You should also be meticulous with your server-side redirects, and — as is often recommended by SEOs — audit your redirect file frequently. Complex chains are more likely to result in a loss of referrer data, and you run the risk of UTM parameters getting stripped out.

Once again, control what you can: use carefully mapped (i.e. non-chained) code 301 server-side redirects to preserve referrer data wherever possible.

5. Non-web documents

Links in Microsoft Word documents, slide decks, or PDFs do not pass referrer information. By default, users who click these links will appear in your reports as direct traffic. Clicks from native mobile apps (particularly those with embedded "in-app" browsers) are similarly prone to stripping out referrer data.

To a degree, this is unavoidable. Much like so-called “dark social” visits (discussed in detail below), non-web links will inevitably result in some quantity of direct traffic. However, you also have an opportunity here to control the controllables.

If you publish whitepapers or offer downloadable PDF guides, for example, you should be tagging the embedded hyperlinks with UTM campaign parameters. You’d never even contemplate launching an email marketing campaign without campaign tracking (I hope), so why would you distribute any other kind of freebie without similarly tracking its success? In some ways this is even more important, since these kinds of downloadables often have a longevity not seen in a single email campaign. Here’s an example of a properly tagged URL which we would embed as a link:

http://ift.tt/2ifQkVi?..._medium=offline_document&utm_campaign=201711_utm_whitepaper

The same goes for URLs in your offline marketing materials. For major campaigns it’s common practice to select a short, memorable URL (e.g. moz.com/tv/) and design an entirely new landing page. It’s possible to bypass page creation altogether: simply redirect the vanity URL to an existing page URL which is properly tagged with UTM parameters.

So, whether you tag your URLs directly, use redirected vanity URLs, or — if you think UTM parameters are ugly — opt for some crazy-ass hash-fragment solution with GTM (read more here), the takeaway is the same: use campaign parameters wherever it’s appropriate to do so.

6. “Dark social”

This is a big one, and probably the least well understood by marketers.

The term “dark social” was first coined back in 2012 by Alexis Madrigal in an article for The Atlantic. Essentially it refers to methods of social sharing which cannot easily be attributed to a particular source, like email, instant messaging, Skype, WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger.

Recent studies have found that upwards of 80% of consumers’ outbound sharing from publishers’ and marketers’ websites now occurs via these private channels. In terms of numbers of active users, messaging apps are outpacing social networking apps. All the activity driven by these thriving platforms is typically bucketed as direct traffic by web analytics software.

People who use the ambiguous phrase “social media marketing” are typically referring to advertising: you broadcast your message and hope people will listen. Even if you overcome consumer indifference with a well-targeted campaign, any subsequent interactions are affected by their very public nature. The privacy of dark social, by contrast, represents a potential goldmine of intimate, targeted, and relevant interactions with high conversion potential. Nebulous and difficult-to-track though it may be, dark social has the potential to let marketers tap into elusive power of word of mouth.

So, how can we minimize the amount of dark social traffic which is bucketed under direct? The unfortunate truth is that there is no magic bullet: proper attribution of dark social requires rigorous campaign tracking. The optimal approach will vary greatly based on your industry, audience, proposition, and so on. For many websites, however, a good first step is to provide convenient and properly configured sharing buttons for private platforms like email, WhatsApp, and Slack, thereby ensuring that users share URLs appended with UTM parameters (or vanity/shortened URLs which redirect to the same). This will go some way towards shining a light on part of your dark social traffic.

Checklist: Minimizing direct traffic

To summarize what we’ve already discussed, here are the steps you can take to minimize the level of unnecessary direct traffic in your reports:

Migrate to HTTPS: Not only is the secure protocol your gateway to HTTP/2 and the future of the web, it will also have an enormously positive effect on your ability to track referral traffic.

Manage your use of redirects: Avoid chains and eliminate client-side redirection in favour of carefully-mapped, single-hop, server-side 301s. If you use vanity URLs to redirect to pages with UTM parameters, be meticulous.

Get really good at campaign tagging: Even amongst data-driven marketers I encounter the belief that UTM begins and ends with switching on automatic tagging in your email marketing software. Others go to the other extreme, doing silly things like tagging internal links. Control what you can, and your ability to carry out meaningful attribution will markedly improve.

Conduct an Analytics audit: Data integrity is vital, so consider this essential when assessing the success of your marketing. It’s not simply a case of checking for missing track code: good audits involve a review of your measurement plan and rigorous testing at page and property-level.

Adhere to these principles, and it’s often possible to achieve a dramatic reduction in the level of direct traffic reported in Analytics. The following example involved an HTTPS migration, GTM migration (as part of an Analytics review), and an overhaul of internal campaign tracking processes over the course of about 6 months:

But the saga of direct traffic doesn’t end there! Once this channel is “clean” — that is, once you’ve minimized the number of avoidable pollutants — what remains might actually be one of your most valuable traffic segments.

Analyze! Or: why direct traffic can actually be pretty cool

For reasons we’ve already discussed, traffic from bookmarks and dark social is an enormously valuable segment to analyze. These are likely to be some of your most loyal and engaged users, and it’s not uncommon to see a notably higher conversion rate for a clean direct channel compared to the site average. You should make the effort to get to know them.

The number of potential avenues to explore is infinite, but here are some good starting points:

Build meaningful custom segments, defining a subset of your direct traffic based on their landing page, location, device, repeat visit or purchase behavior, or even enhanced e-commerce interactions.

Track meaningful engagement metrics using modern GTM triggers such as element visibility and native scroll tracking. Measure how your direct users are using and viewing your content.

Watch for correlations with your other marketing activities, and use it as an opportunity to refine your tagging practices and segment definitions. Create a custom alert which watches for spikes in direct traffic.

Familiarize yourself with flow reports to get an understanding of how your direct traffic is converting. By using Goal Flow and Behavior Flow reports with segmentation, it’s often possible to glean actionable insights which can be applied to the site as a whole.

Ask your users for help! If you’ve isolated a valuable segment of traffic which eludes deeper analysis, add a button to the page offering visitors a free downloadable ebook if they tell you how they discovered your page.

Start thinking about lifetime value, if you haven’t already — overhauling your attribution model or implementing User ID are good steps towards overcoming the indifference or frustration felt by marketers towards direct traffic.

I hope this guide has been useful. With any luck, you arrived looking for ways to reduce the level of direct traffic in your reports, and left with some new ideas for how to better analyze this valuable segment of users.

Thanks for reading!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

from Blogger http://ift.tt/2jzNfMe via IFTTT

[swunlimitednj]

The Complete Guide to Direct Traffic in Google Analytics

Posted by tombennet

When it comes to direct traffic in Analytics, there are two deeply entrenched misconceptions.

The first is that it’s caused almost exclusively by users typing an address into their browser (or clicking on a bookmark). The second is that it’s a Bad Thing, not because it has any overt negative impact on your site’s performance, but rather because it’s somehow immune to further analysis. The prevailing attitude amongst digital marketers is that direct traffic is an unavoidable inconvenience; as a result, discussion of direct is typically limited to ways of attributing it to other channels, or side-stepping the issues associated with it.

In this article, we’ll be taking a fresh look at direct traffic in modern Google Analytics. As well as exploring the myriad ways in which referrer data can be lost, we’ll look at some tools and tactics you can start using immediately to reduce levels of direct traffic in your reports. Finally, we’ll discover how advanced analysis and segmentation can unlock the mysteries of direct traffic and shed light on what might actually be your most valuable users.

What is direct traffic?

In short, Google Analytics will report a traffic source of "direct" when it has no data on how the session arrived at your website, or when the referring source has been configured to be ignored. You can think of direct as GA’s fall-back option for when its processing logic has failed to attribute a session to a particular source.

To properly understand the causes and fixes for direct traffic, it’s important to understand exactly how GA processes traffic sources. The following flow-chart illustrates how sessions are bucketed — note that direct sits right at the end as a final "catch-all" group.

Broadly speaking, and disregarding user-configured overrides, GA’s processing follows this sequence of checks:

AdWords parameters > Campaign overrides > UTM campaign parameters > Referred by a search engine > Referred by another website > Previous campaign within timeout period > Direct

Note the penultimate processing step (previous campaign within timeout), which has a significant impact on the direct channel. Consider a user who discovers your site via organic search, then returns via direct a week later. Both sessions would be attributed to organic search. In fact, campaign data persists for up to six months by default. The key point here is that Google Analytics is already trying to minimize the impact of direct traffic for you.

What causes direct traffic?

Contrary to popular belief, there are actually many reasons why a session might be missing campaign and traffic source data. Here we will run through some of the most common.

1. Manual address entry and bookmarks

The classic direct-traffic scenario, this one is largely unavoidable. If a user types a URL into their browser’s address bar or clicks on a browser bookmark, that session will appear as direct traffic.

Simple as that.

2. HTTPS > HTTP

When a user follows a link on a secure (HTTPS) page to a non-secure (HTTP) page, no referrer data is passed, meaning the session appears as direct traffic instead of as a referral. Note that this is intended behavior. It’s part of how the secure protocol was designed, and it does not affect other scenarios: HTTP to HTTP, HTTPS to HTTPS, and even HTTP to HTTPS all pass referrer data.

So, if your referral traffic has tanked but direct has spiked, it could be that one of your major referrers has migrated to HTTPS. The inverse is also true: If you’ve migrated to HTTPS and are linking to HTTP websites, the traffic you’re driving to them will appear in their Analytics as direct.

If your referrers have moved to HTTPS and you’re stuck on HTTP, you really ought to consider migrating to HTTPS. Doing so (and updating your backlinks to point to HTTPS URLs) will bring back any referrer data which is being stripped from cross-protocol traffic. SSL certificates can now be obtained for free thanks to automated authorities like LetsEncrypt, but that’s not to say you should neglect to explore the potentially-significant SEO implications of site migrations. Remember, HTTPS and HTTP/2 are the future of the web.

If, on the other hand, you’ve already migrated to HTTPS and are concerned about your users appearing to partner websites as direct traffic, you can implement the meta referrer tag. Cyrus Shepard has written about this on Moz before, so I won’t delve into it now. Suffice to say, it’s a way of telling browsers to pass some referrer data to non-secure sites, and can be implemented as a <meta> element or HTTP header.

3. Missing or broken tracking code

Let’s say you’ve launched a new landing page template and forgotten to include the GA tracking code. Or, to use a scenario I’m encountering more and more frequently, imagine your GTM container is a horrible mess of poorly configured triggers, and your tracking code is simply failing to fire.

Users land on this page without tracking code. They click on a link to a deeper page which does have tracking code. From GA’s perspective, the first hit of the session is the second page visited, meaning that the referrer appears as your own website (i.e. a self-referral). If your domain is on the referral exclusion list (as per default configuration), the session is bucketed as direct. This will happen even if the first URL is tagged with UTM campaign parameters.

As a short-term fix, you can try to repair the damage by simply adding the missing tracking code. To prevent it happening again, carry out a thorough Analytics audit, move to a GTM-based tracking implementation, and promote a culture of data-driven marketing.

4. Improper redirection

This is an easy one. Don’t use meta refreshes or JavaScript-based redirects — these can wipe or replace referrer data, leading to direct traffic in Analytics. You should also be meticulous with your server-side redirects, and — as is often recommended by SEOs — audit your redirect file frequently. Complex chains are more likely to result in a loss of referrer data, and you run the risk of UTM parameters getting stripped out.

Once again, control what you can: use carefully mapped (i.e. non-chained) code 301 server-side redirects to preserve referrer data wherever possible.

5. Non-web documents

Links in Microsoft Word documents, slide decks, or PDFs do not pass referrer information. By default, users who click these links will appear in your reports as direct traffic. Clicks from native mobile apps (particularly those with embedded "in-app" browsers) are similarly prone to stripping out referrer data.

To a degree, this is unavoidable. Much like so-called “dark social” visits (discussed in detail below), non-web links will inevitably result in some quantity of direct traffic. However, you also have an opportunity here to control the controllables.

If you publish whitepapers or offer downloadable PDF guides, for example, you should be tagging the embedded hyperlinks with UTM campaign parameters. You’d never even contemplate launching an email marketing campaign without campaign tracking (I hope), so why would you distribute any other kind of freebie without similarly tracking its success? In some ways this is even more important, since these kinds of downloadables often have a longevity not seen in a single email campaign. Here’s an example of a properly tagged URL which we would embed as a link:

http://ift.tt/2ifQkVi?..._medium=offline_document&utm_campaign=201711_utm_whitepaper

The same goes for URLs in your offline marketing materials. For major campaigns it’s common practice to select a short, memorable URL (e.g. moz.com/tv/) and design an entirely new landing page. It’s possible to bypass page creation altogether: simply redirect the vanity URL to an existing page URL which is properly tagged with UTM parameters.

So, whether you tag your URLs directly, use redirected vanity URLs, or — if you think UTM parameters are ugly — opt for some crazy-ass hash-fragment solution with GTM (read more here), the takeaway is the same: use campaign parameters wherever it’s appropriate to do so.

6. “Dark social”

This is a big one, and probably the least well understood by marketers.

The term “dark social” was first coined back in 2012 by Alexis Madrigal in an article for The Atlantic. Essentially it refers to methods of social sharing which cannot easily be attributed to a particular source, like email, instant messaging, Skype, WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger.

Recent studies have found that upwards of 80% of consumers’ outbound sharing from publishers’ and marketers’ websites now occurs via these private channels. In terms of numbers of active users, messaging apps are outpacing social networking apps. All the activity driven by these thriving platforms is typically bucketed as direct traffic by web analytics software.

People who use the ambiguous phrase “social media marketing” are typically referring to advertising: you broadcast your message and hope people will listen. Even if you overcome consumer indifference with a well-targeted campaign, any subsequent interactions are affected by their very public nature. The privacy of dark social, by contrast, represents a potential goldmine of intimate, targeted, and relevant interactions with high conversion potential. Nebulous and difficult-to-track though it may be, dark social has the potential to let marketers tap into elusive power of word of mouth.

So, how can we minimize the amount of dark social traffic which is bucketed under direct? The unfortunate truth is that there is no magic bullet: proper attribution of dark social requires rigorous campaign tracking. The optimal approach will vary greatly based on your industry, audience, proposition, and so on. For many websites, however, a good first step is to provide convenient and properly configured sharing buttons for private platforms like email, WhatsApp, and Slack, thereby ensuring that users share URLs appended with UTM parameters (or vanity/shortened URLs which redirect to the same). This will go some way towards shining a light on part of your dark social traffic.

Checklist: Minimizing direct traffic

To summarize what we’ve already discussed, here are the steps you can take to minimize the level of unnecessary direct traffic in your reports:

Migrate to HTTPS: Not only is the secure protocol your gateway to HTTP/2 and the future of the web, it will also have an enormously positive effect on your ability to track referral traffic.

Manage your use of redirects: Avoid chains and eliminate client-side redirection in favour of carefully-mapped, single-hop, server-side 301s. If you use vanity URLs to redirect to pages with UTM parameters, be meticulous.

Get really good at campaign tagging: Even amongst data-driven marketers I encounter the belief that UTM begins and ends with switching on automatic tagging in your email marketing software. Others go to the other extreme, doing silly things like tagging internal links. Control what you can, and your ability to carry out meaningful attribution will markedly improve.

Conduct an Analytics audit: Data integrity is vital, so consider this essential when assessing the success of your marketing. It’s not simply a case of checking for missing track code: good audits involve a review of your measurement plan and rigorous testing at page and property-level.

Adhere to these principles, and it’s often possible to achieve a dramatic reduction in the level of direct traffic reported in Analytics. The following example involved an HTTPS migration, GTM migration (as part of an Analytics review), and an overhaul of internal campaign tracking processes over the course of about 6 months:

But the saga of direct traffic doesn’t end there! Once this channel is “clean” — that is, once you’ve minimized the number of avoidable pollutants — what remains might actually be one of your most valuable traffic segments.

Analyze! Or: why direct traffic can actually be pretty cool

For reasons we’ve already discussed, traffic from bookmarks and dark social is an enormously valuable segment to analyze. These are likely to be some of your most loyal and engaged users, and it’s not uncommon to see a notably higher conversion rate for a clean direct channel compared to the site average. You should make the effort to get to know them.

The number of potential avenues to explore is infinite, but here are some good starting points:

Build meaningful custom segments, defining a subset of your direct traffic based on their landing page, location, device, repeat visit or purchase behavior, or even enhanced e-commerce interactions.

Track meaningful engagement metrics using modern GTM triggers such as element visibility and native scroll tracking. Measure how your direct users are using and viewing your content.

Watch for correlations with your other marketing activities, and use it as an opportunity to refine your tagging practices and segment definitions. Create a custom alert which watches for spikes in direct traffic.

Familiarize yourself with flow reports to get an understanding of how your direct traffic is converting. By using Goal Flow and Behavior Flow reports with segmentation, it’s often possible to glean actionable insights which can be applied to the site as a whole.

Ask your users for help! If you’ve isolated a valuable segment of traffic which eludes deeper analysis, add a button to the page offering visitors a free downloadable ebook if they tell you how they discovered your page.

Start thinking about lifetime value, if you haven’t already — overhauling your attribution model or implementing User ID are good steps towards overcoming the indifference or frustration felt by marketers towards direct traffic.

I hope this guide has been useful. With any luck, you arrived looking for ways to reduce the level of direct traffic in your reports, and left with some new ideas for how to better analyze this valuable segment of users.

Thanks for reading!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

from Blogger http://ift.tt/2BktGPx via SW Unlimited

[hellorajasthaniawaz]

The Complete Guide to Direct Traffic in Google Analytics

Posted by tombennet

When it comes to direct traffic in Analytics, there are two deeply entrenched misconceptions.

The first is that it’s caused almost exclusively by users typing an address into their browser (or clicking on a bookmark). The second is that it’s a Bad Thing, not because it has any overt negative impact on your site’s performance, but rather because it’s somehow immune to further analysis. The prevailing attitude amongst digital marketers is that direct traffic is an unavoidable inconvenience; as a result, discussion of direct is typically limited to ways of attributing it to other channels, or side-stepping the issues associated with it.

In this article, we’ll be taking a fresh look at direct traffic in modern Google Analytics. As well as exploring the myriad ways in which referrer data can be lost, we’ll look at some tools and tactics you can start using immediately to reduce levels of direct traffic in your reports. Finally, we’ll discover how advanced analysis and segmentation can unlock the mysteries of direct traffic and shed light on what might actually be your most valuable users.

What is direct traffic?

In short, Google Analytics will report a traffic source of "direct" when it has no data on how the session arrived at your website, or when the referring source has been configured to be ignored. You can think of direct as GA’s fall-back option for when its processing logic has failed to attribute a session to a particular source.

To properly understand the causes and fixes for direct traffic, it’s important to understand exactly how GA processes traffic sources. The following flow-chart illustrates how sessions are bucketed — note that direct sits right at the end as a final "catch-all" group.

Broadly speaking, and disregarding user-configured overrides, GA’s processing follows this sequence of checks:

AdWords parameters > Campaign overrides > UTM campaign parameters > Referred by a search engine > Referred by another website > Previous campaign within timeout period > Direct

Note the penultimate processing step (previous campaign within timeout), which has a significant impact on the direct channel. Consider a user who discovers your site via organic search, then returns via direct a week later. Both sessions would be attributed to organic search. In fact, campaign data persists for up to six months by default. The key point here is that Google Analytics is already trying to minimize the impact of direct traffic for you.

What causes direct traffic?

Contrary to popular belief, there are actually many reasons why a session might be missing campaign and traffic source data. Here we will run through some of the most common.

1. Manual address entry and bookmarks

The classic direct-traffic scenario, this one is largely unavoidable. If a user types a URL into their browser’s address bar or clicks on a browser bookmark, that session will appear as direct traffic.

Simple as that.

2. HTTPS > HTTP

When a user follows a link on a secure (HTTPS) page to a non-secure (HTTP) page, no referrer data is passed, meaning the session appears as direct traffic instead of as a referral. Note that this is intended behavior. It’s part of how the secure protocol was designed, and it does not affect other scenarios: HTTP to HTTP, HTTPS to HTTPS, and even HTTP to HTTPS all pass referrer data.

So, if your referral traffic has tanked but direct has spiked, it could be that one of your major referrers has migrated to HTTPS. The inverse is also true: If you’ve migrated to HTTPS and are linking to HTTP websites, the traffic you’re driving to them will appear in their Analytics as direct.

If your referrers have moved to HTTPS and you’re stuck on HTTP, you really ought to consider migrating to HTTPS. Doing so (and updating your backlinks to point to HTTPS URLs) will bring back any referrer data which is being stripped from cross-protocol traffic. SSL certificates can now be obtained for free thanks to automated authorities like LetsEncrypt, but that’s not to say you should neglect to explore the potentially-significant SEO implications of site migrations. Remember, HTTPS and HTTP/2 are the future of the web.

If, on the other hand, you’ve already migrated to HTTPS and are concerned about your users appearing to partner websites as direct traffic, you can implement the meta referrer tag. Cyrus Shepard has written about this on Moz before, so I won’t delve into it now. Suffice to say, it’s a way of telling browsers to pass some referrer data to non-secure sites, and can be implemented as a <meta> element or HTTP header.

3. Missing or broken tracking code

Let’s say you’ve launched a new landing page template and forgotten to include the GA tracking code. Or, to use a scenario I’m encountering more and more frequently, imagine your GTM container is a horrible mess of poorly configured triggers, and your tracking code is simply failing to fire.

Users land on this page without tracking code. They click on a link to a deeper page which does have tracking code. From GA’s perspective, the first hit of the session is the second page visited, meaning that the referrer appears as your own website (i.e. a self-referral). If your domain is on the referral exclusion list (as per default configuration), the session is bucketed as direct. This will happen even if the first URL is tagged with UTM campaign parameters.

As a short-term fix, you can try to repair the damage by simply adding the missing tracking code. To prevent it happening again, carry out a thorough Analytics audit, move to a GTM-based tracking implementation, and promote a culture of data-driven marketing.

4. Improper redirection

This is an easy one. Don’t use meta refreshes or JavaScript-based redirects — these can wipe or replace referrer data, leading to direct traffic in Analytics. You should also be meticulous with your server-side redirects, and — as is often recommended by SEOs — audit your redirect file frequently. Complex chains are more likely to result in a loss of referrer data, and you run the risk of UTM parameters getting stripped out.

Once again, control what you can: use carefully mapped (i.e. non-chained) code 301 server-side redirects to preserve referrer data wherever possible.

5. Non-web documents

Links in Microsoft Word documents, slide decks, or PDFs do not pass referrer information. By default, users who click these links will appear in your reports as direct traffic. Clicks from native mobile apps (particularly those with embedded "in-app" browsers) are similarly prone to stripping out referrer data.

To a degree, this is unavoidable. Much like so-called “dark social” visits (discussed in detail below), non-web links will inevitably result in some quantity of direct traffic. However, you also have an opportunity here to control the controllables.

If you publish whitepapers or offer downloadable PDF guides, for example, you should be tagging the embedded hyperlinks with UTM campaign parameters. You’d never even contemplate launching an email marketing campaign without campaign tracking (I hope), so why would you distribute any other kind of freebie without similarly tracking its success? In some ways this is even more important, since these kinds of downloadables often have a longevity not seen in a single email campaign. Here’s an example of a properly tagged URL which we would embed as a link:

http://ift.tt/2ifQkVi?..._medium=offline_document&utm_campaign=201711_utm_whitepaper

The same goes for URLs in your offline marketing materials. For major campaigns it’s common practice to select a short, memorable URL (e.g. moz.com/tv/) and design an entirely new landing page. It’s possible to bypass page creation altogether: simply redirect the vanity URL to an existing page URL which is properly tagged with UTM parameters.

So, whether you tag your URLs directly, use redirected vanity URLs, or — if you think UTM parameters are ugly — opt for some crazy-ass hash-fragment solution with GTM (read more here), the takeaway is the same: use campaign parameters wherever it’s appropriate to do so.

6. “Dark social”

This is a big one, and probably the least well understood by marketers.

The term “dark social” was first coined back in 2012 by Alexis Madrigal in an article for The Atlantic. Essentially it refers to methods of social sharing which cannot easily be attributed to a particular source, like email, instant messaging, Skype, WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger.

Recent studies have found that upwards of 80% of consumers’ outbound sharing from publishers’ and marketers’ websites now occurs via these private channels. In terms of numbers of active users, messaging apps are outpacing social networking apps. All the activity driven by these thriving platforms is typically bucketed as direct traffic by web analytics software.

People who use the ambiguous phrase “social media marketing” are typically referring to advertising: you broadcast your message and hope people will listen. Even if you overcome consumer indifference with a well-targeted campaign, any subsequent interactions are affected by their very public nature. The privacy of dark social, by contrast, represents a potential goldmine of intimate, targeted, and relevant interactions with high conversion potential. Nebulous and difficult-to-track though it may be, dark social has the potential to let marketers tap into elusive power of word of mouth.

So, how can we minimize the amount of dark social traffic which is bucketed under direct? The unfortunate truth is that there is no magic bullet: proper attribution of dark social requires rigorous campaign tracking. The optimal approach will vary greatly based on your industry, audience, proposition, and so on. For many websites, however, a good first step is to provide convenient and properly configured sharing buttons for private platforms like email, WhatsApp, and Slack, thereby ensuring that users share URLs appended with UTM parameters (or vanity/shortened URLs which redirect to the same). This will go some way towards shining a light on part of your dark social traffic.

Checklist: Minimizing direct traffic

To summarize what we’ve already discussed, here are the steps you can take to minimize the level of unnecessary direct traffic in your reports:

Migrate to HTTPS: Not only is the secure protocol your gateway to HTTP/2 and the future of the web, it will also have an enormously positive effect on your ability to track referral traffic.

Manage your use of redirects: Avoid chains and eliminate client-side redirection in favour of carefully-mapped, single-hop, server-side 301s. If you use vanity URLs to redirect to pages with UTM parameters, be meticulous.

Get really good at campaign tagging: Even amongst data-driven marketers I encounter the belief that UTM begins and ends with switching on automatic tagging in your email marketing software. Others go to the other extreme, doing silly things like tagging internal links. Control what you can, and your ability to carry out meaningful attribution will markedly improve.

Conduct an Analytics audit: Data integrity is vital, so consider this essential when assessing the success of your marketing. It’s not simply a case of checking for missing track code: good audits involve a review of your measurement plan and rigorous testing at page and property-level.

Adhere to these principles, and it’s often possible to achieve a dramatic reduction in the level of direct traffic reported in Analytics. The following example involved an HTTPS migration, GTM migration (as part of an Analytics review), and an overhaul of internal campaign tracking processes over the course of about 6 months:

But the saga of direct traffic doesn’t end there! Once this channel is “clean” — that is, once you’ve minimized the number of avoidable pollutants — what remains might actually be one of your most valuable traffic segments.

Analyze! Or: why direct traffic can actually be pretty cool

For reasons we’ve already discussed, traffic from bookmarks and dark social is an enormously valuable segment to analyze. These are likely to be some of your most loyal and engaged users, and it’s not uncommon to see a notably higher conversion rate for a clean direct channel compared to the site average. You should make the effort to get to know them.

The number of potential avenues to explore is infinite, but here are some good starting points:

Build meaningful custom segments, defining a subset of your direct traffic based on their landing page, location, device, repeat visit or purchase behavior, or even enhanced e-commerce interactions.

Track meaningful engagement metrics using modern GTM triggers such as element visibility and native scroll tracking. Measure how your direct users are using and viewing your content.

Watch for correlations with your other marketing activities, and use it as an opportunity to refine your tagging practices and segment definitions. Create a custom alert which watches for spikes in direct traffic.

Familiarize yourself with flow reports to get an understanding of how your direct traffic is converting. By using Goal Flow and Behavior Flow reports with segmentation, it’s often possible to glean actionable insights which can be applied to the site as a whole.

Ask your users for help! If you’ve isolated a valuable segment of traffic which eludes deeper analysis, add a button to the page offering visitors a free downloadable ebook if they tell you how they discovered your page.

Start thinking about lifetime value, if you haven’t already — overhauling your attribution model or implementing User ID are good steps towards overcoming the indifference or frustration felt by marketers towards direct traffic.

I hope this guide has been useful. With any luck, you arrived looking for ways to reduce the level of direct traffic in your reports, and left with some new ideas for how to better analyze this valuable segment of users.

Thanks for reading!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

[neilmberry]

The Complete Guide to Direct Traffic in Google Analytics

Posted by tombennet

When it comes to direct traffic in Analytics, there are two deeply entrenched misconceptions.

The first is that it’s caused almost exclusively by users typing an address into their browser (or clicking on a bookmark). The second is that it’s a Bad Thing, not because it has any overt negative impact on your site’s performance, but rather because it’s somehow immune to further analysis. The prevailing attitude amongst digital marketers is that direct traffic is an unavoidable inconvenience; as a result, discussion of direct is typically limited to ways of attributing it to other channels, or side-stepping the issues associated with it.

In this article, we’ll be taking a fresh look at direct traffic in modern Google Analytics. As well as exploring the myriad ways in which referrer data can be lost, we’ll look at some tools and tactics you can start using immediately to reduce levels of direct traffic in your reports. Finally, we’ll discover how advanced analysis and segmentation can unlock the mysteries of direct traffic and shed light on what might actually be your most valuable users.

What is direct traffic?

In short, Google Analytics will report a traffic source of "direct" when it has no data on how the session arrived at your website, or when the referring source has been configured to be ignored. You can think of direct as GA’s fall-back option for when its processing logic has failed to attribute a session to a particular source.

To properly understand the causes and fixes for direct traffic, it’s important to understand exactly how GA processes traffic sources. The following flow-chart illustrates how sessions are bucketed — note that direct sits right at the end as a final "catch-all" group.

Broadly speaking, and disregarding user-configured overrides, GA’s processing follows this sequence of checks:

AdWords parameters > Campaign overrides > UTM campaign parameters > Referred by a search engine > Referred by another website > Previous campaign within timeout period > Direct

Note the penultimate processing step (previous campaign within timeout), which has a significant impact on the direct channel. Consider a user who discovers your site via organic search, then returns via direct a week later. Both sessions would be attributed to organic search. In fact, campaign data persists for up to six months by default. The key point here is that Google Analytics is already trying to minimize the impact of direct traffic for you.

What causes direct traffic?

Contrary to popular belief, there are actually many reasons why a session might be missing campaign and traffic source data. Here we will run through some of the most common.

1. Manual address entry and bookmarks

The classic direct-traffic scenario, this one is largely unavoidable. If a user types a URL into their browser’s address bar or clicks on a browser bookmark, that session will appear as direct traffic.

Simple as that.

2. HTTPS > HTTP

When a user follows a link on a secure (HTTPS) page to a non-secure (HTTP) page, no referrer data is passed, meaning the session appears as direct traffic instead of as a referral. Note that this is intended behavior. It’s part of how the secure protocol was designed, and it does not affect other scenarios: HTTP to HTTP, HTTPS to HTTPS, and even HTTP to HTTPS all pass referrer data.

So, if your referral traffic has tanked but direct has spiked, it could be that one of your major referrers has migrated to HTTPS. The inverse is also true: If you’ve migrated to HTTPS and are linking to HTTP websites, the traffic you’re driving to them will appear in their Analytics as direct.

If your referrers have moved to HTTPS and you’re stuck on HTTP, you really ought to consider migrating to HTTPS. Doing so (and updating your backlinks to point to HTTPS URLs) will bring back any referrer data which is being stripped from cross-protocol traffic. SSL certificates can now be obtained for free thanks to automated authorities like LetsEncrypt, but that’s not to say you should neglect to explore the potentially-significant SEO implications of site migrations. Remember, HTTPS and HTTP/2 are the future of the web.

If, on the other hand, you’ve already migrated to HTTPS and are concerned about your users appearing to partner websites as direct traffic, you can implement the meta referrer tag. Cyrus Shepard has written about this on Moz before, so I won’t delve into it now. Suffice to say, it’s a way of telling browsers to pass some referrer data to non-secure sites, and can be implemented as a <meta> element or HTTP header.

3. Missing or broken tracking code

Let’s say you’ve launched a new landing page template and forgotten to include the GA tracking code. Or, to use a scenario I’m encountering more and more frequently, imagine your GTM container is a horrible mess of poorly configured triggers, and your tracking code is simply failing to fire.

Users land on this page without tracking code. They click on a link to a deeper page which does have tracking code. From GA’s perspective, the first hit of the session is the second page visited, meaning that the referrer appears as your own website (i.e. a self-referral). If your domain is on the referral exclusion list (as per default configuration), the session is bucketed as direct. This will happen even if the first URL is tagged with UTM campaign parameters.

As a short-term fix, you can try to repair the damage by simply adding the missing tracking code. To prevent it happening again, carry out a thorough Analytics audit, move to a GTM-based tracking implementation, and promote a culture of data-driven marketing.

4. Improper redirection

This is an easy one. Don’t use meta refreshes or JavaScript-based redirects — these can wipe or replace referrer data, leading to direct traffic in Analytics. You should also be meticulous with your server-side redirects, and — as is often recommended by SEOs — audit your redirect file frequently. Complex chains are more likely to result in a loss of referrer data, and you run the risk of UTM parameters getting stripped out.

Once again, control what you can: use carefully mapped (i.e. non-chained) code 301 server-side redirects to preserve referrer data wherever possible.

5. Non-web documents

Links in Microsoft Word documents, slide decks, or PDFs do not pass referrer information. By default, users who click these links will appear in your reports as direct traffic. Clicks from native mobile apps (particularly those with embedded "in-app" browsers) are similarly prone to stripping out referrer data.

To a degree, this is unavoidable. Much like so-called “dark social” visits (discussed in detail below), non-web links will inevitably result in some quantity of direct traffic. However, you also have an opportunity here to control the controllables.

If you publish whitepapers or offer downloadable PDF guides, for example, you should be tagging the embedded hyperlinks with UTM campaign parameters. You’d never even contemplate launching an email marketing campaign without campaign tracking (I hope), so why would you distribute any other kind of freebie without similarly tracking its success? In some ways this is even more important, since these kinds of downloadables often have a longevity not seen in a single email campaign. Here’s an example of a properly tagged URL which we would embed as a link:

http://ift.tt/2ifQkVi?..._medium=offline_document&utm_campaign=201711_utm_whitepaper

The same goes for URLs in your offline marketing materials. For major campaigns it’s common practice to select a short, memorable URL (e.g. moz.com/tv/) and design an entirely new landing page. It’s possible to bypass page creation altogether: simply redirect the vanity URL to an existing page URL which is properly tagged with UTM parameters.

So, whether you tag your URLs directly, use redirected vanity URLs, or — if you think UTM parameters are ugly — opt for some crazy-ass hash-fragment solution with GTM (read more here), the takeaway is the same: use campaign parameters wherever it’s appropriate to do so.

6. “Dark social”

This is a big one, and probably the least well understood by marketers.

The term “dark social” was first coined back in 2012 by Alexis Madrigal in an article for The Atlantic. Essentially it refers to methods of social sharing which cannot easily be attributed to a particular source, like email, instant messaging, Skype, WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger.

Recent studies have found that upwards of 80% of consumers’ outbound sharing from publishers’ and marketers’ websites now occurs via these private channels. In terms of numbers of active users, messaging apps are outpacing social networking apps. All the activity driven by these thriving platforms is typically bucketed as direct traffic by web analytics software.

People who use the ambiguous phrase “social media marketing” are typically referring to advertising: you broadcast your message and hope people will listen. Even if you overcome consumer indifference with a well-targeted campaign, any subsequent interactions are affected by their very public nature. The privacy of dark social, by contrast, represents a potential goldmine of intimate, targeted, and relevant interactions with high conversion potential. Nebulous and difficult-to-track though it may be, dark social has the potential to let marketers tap into elusive power of word of mouth.

So, how can we minimize the amount of dark social traffic which is bucketed under direct? The unfortunate truth is that there is no magic bullet: proper attribution of dark social requires rigorous campaign tracking. The optimal approach will vary greatly based on your industry, audience, proposition, and so on. For many websites, however, a good first step is to provide convenient and properly configured sharing buttons for private platforms like email, WhatsApp, and Slack, thereby ensuring that users share URLs appended with UTM parameters (or vanity/shortened URLs which redirect to the same). This will go some way towards shining a light on part of your dark social traffic.

Checklist: Minimizing direct traffic

To summarize what we’ve already discussed, here are the steps you can take to minimize the level of unnecessary direct traffic in your reports:

Migrate to HTTPS: Not only is the secure protocol your gateway to HTTP/2 and the future of the web, it will also have an enormously positive effect on your ability to track referral traffic.

Manage your use of redirects: Avoid chains and eliminate client-side redirection in favour of carefully-mapped, single-hop, server-side 301s. If you use vanity URLs to redirect to pages with UTM parameters, be meticulous.

Get really good at campaign tagging: Even amongst data-driven marketers I encounter the belief that UTM begins and ends with switching on automatic tagging in your email marketing software. Others go to the other extreme, doing silly things like tagging internal links. Control what you can, and your ability to carry out meaningful attribution will markedly improve.

Conduct an Analytics audit: Data integrity is vital, so consider this essential when assessing the success of your marketing. It’s not simply a case of checking for missing track code: good audits involve a review of your measurement plan and rigorous testing at page and property-level.

Adhere to these principles, and it’s often possible to achieve a dramatic reduction in the level of direct traffic reported in Analytics. The following example involved an HTTPS migration, GTM migration (as part of an Analytics review), and an overhaul of internal campaign tracking processes over the course of about 6 months:

But the saga of direct traffic doesn’t end there! Once this channel is “clean” — that is, once you’ve minimized the number of avoidable pollutants — what remains might actually be one of your most valuable traffic segments.

Analyze! Or: why direct traffic can actually be pretty cool

For reasons we’ve already discussed, traffic from bookmarks and dark social is an enormously valuable segment to analyze. These are likely to be some of your most loyal and engaged users, and it’s not uncommon to see a notably higher conversion rate for a clean direct channel compared to the site average. You should make the effort to get to know them.

The number of potential avenues to explore is infinite, but here are some good starting points:

Build meaningful custom segments, defining a subset of your direct traffic based on their landing page, location, device, repeat visit or purchase behavior, or even enhanced e-commerce interactions.

Track meaningful engagement metrics using modern GTM triggers such as element visibility and native scroll tracking. Measure how your direct users are using and viewing your content.

Watch for correlations with your other marketing activities, and use it as an opportunity to refine your tagging practices and segment definitions. Create a custom alert which watches for spikes in direct traffic.

Familiarize yourself with flow reports to get an understanding of how your direct traffic is converting. By using Goal Flow and Behavior Flow reports with segmentation, it’s often possible to glean actionable insights which can be applied to the site as a whole.

Ask your users for help! If you’ve isolated a valuable segment of traffic which eludes deeper analysis, add a button to the page offering visitors a free downloadable ebook if they tell you how they discovered your page.

Start thinking about lifetime value, if you haven’t already — overhauling your attribution model or implementing User ID are good steps towards overcoming the indifference or frustration felt by marketers towards direct traffic.

I hope this guide has been useful. With any luck, you arrived looking for ways to reduce the level of direct traffic in your reports, and left with some new ideas for how to better analyze this valuable segment of users.

Thanks for reading!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

The Complete Guide to Direct Traffic in Google Analytics published first on http://elitelimobog.blogspot.com

[holmescorya]

The Complete Guide to Direct Traffic in Google Analytics

Posted by tombennet

When it comes to direct traffic in Analytics, there are two deeply entrenched misconceptions.

The first is that it’s caused almost exclusively by users typing an address into their browser (or clicking on a bookmark). The second is that it’s a Bad Thing, not because it has any overt negative impact on your site’s performance, but rather because it’s somehow immune to further analysis. The prevailing attitude amongst digital marketers is that direct traffic is an unavoidable inconvenience; as a result, discussion of direct is typically limited to ways of attributing it to other channels, or side-stepping the issues associated with it.

In this article, we’ll be taking a fresh look at direct traffic in modern Google Analytics. As well as exploring the myriad ways in which referrer data can be lost, we’ll look at some tools and tactics you can start using immediately to reduce levels of direct traffic in your reports. Finally, we’ll discover how advanced analysis and segmentation can unlock the mysteries of direct traffic and shed light on what might actually be your most valuable users.

What is direct traffic?

In short, Google Analytics will report a traffic source of "direct" when it has no data on how the session arrived at your website, or when the referring source has been configured to be ignored. You can think of direct as GA’s fall-back option for when its processing logic has failed to attribute a session to a particular source.

To properly understand the causes and fixes for direct traffic, it’s important to understand exactly how GA processes traffic sources. The following flow-chart illustrates how sessions are bucketed — note that direct sits right at the end as a final "catch-all" group.

Broadly speaking, and disregarding user-configured overrides, GA’s processing follows this sequence of checks:

AdWords parameters > Campaign overrides > UTM campaign parameters > Referred by a search engine > Referred by another website > Previous campaign within timeout period > Direct

Note the penultimate processing step (previous campaign within timeout), which has a significant impact on the direct channel. Consider a user who discovers your site via organic search, then returns via direct a week later. Both sessions would be attributed to organic search. In fact, campaign data persists for up to six months by default. The key point here is that Google Analytics is already trying to minimize the impact of direct traffic for you.

What causes direct traffic?

Contrary to popular belief, there are actually many reasons why a session might be missing campaign and traffic source data. Here we will run through some of the most common.

1. Manual address entry and bookmarks

The classic direct-traffic scenario, this one is largely unavoidable. If a user types a URL into their browser’s address bar or clicks on a browser bookmark, that session will appear as direct traffic.

Simple as that.

2. HTTPS > HTTP

When a user follows a link on a secure (HTTPS) page to a non-secure (HTTP) page, no referrer data is passed, meaning the session appears as direct traffic instead of as a referral. Note that this is intended behavior. It’s part of how the secure protocol was designed, and it does not affect other scenarios: HTTP to HTTP, HTTPS to HTTPS, and even HTTP to HTTPS all pass referrer data.

So, if your referral traffic has tanked but direct has spiked, it could be that one of your major referrers has migrated to HTTPS. The inverse is also true: If you’ve migrated to HTTPS and are linking to HTTP websites, the traffic you’re driving to them will appear in their Analytics as direct.

If your referrers have moved to HTTPS and you’re stuck on HTTP, you really ought to consider migrating to HTTPS. Doing so (and updating your backlinks to point to HTTPS URLs) will bring back any referrer data which is being stripped from cross-protocol traffic. SSL certificates can now be obtained for free thanks to automated authorities like LetsEncrypt, but that’s not to say you should neglect to explore the potentially-significant SEO implications of site migrations. Remember, HTTPS and HTTP/2 are the future of the web.

If, on the other hand, you’ve already migrated to HTTPS and are concerned about your users appearing to partner websites as direct traffic, you can implement the meta referrer tag. Cyrus Shepard has written about this on Moz before, so I won’t delve into it now. Suffice to say, it’s a way of telling browsers to pass some referrer data to non-secure sites, and can be implemented as a <meta> element or HTTP header.

3. Missing or broken tracking code

Let’s say you’ve launched a new landing page template and forgotten to include the GA tracking code. Or, to use a scenario I’m encountering more and more frequently, imagine your GTM container is a horrible mess of poorly configured triggers, and your tracking code is simply failing to fire.

Users land on this page without tracking code. They click on a link to a deeper page which does have tracking code. From GA’s perspective, the first hit of the session is the second page visited, meaning that the referrer appears as your own website (i.e. a self-referral). If your domain is on the referral exclusion list (as per default configuration), the session is bucketed as direct. This will happen even if the first URL is tagged with UTM campaign parameters.

As a short-term fix, you can try to repair the damage by simply adding the missing tracking code. To prevent it happening again, carry out a thorough Analytics audit, move to a GTM-based tracking implementation, and promote a culture of data-driven marketing.

4. Improper redirection

This is an easy one. Don’t use meta refreshes or JavaScript-based redirects — these can wipe or replace referrer data, leading to direct traffic in Analytics. You should also be meticulous with your server-side redirects, and — as is often recommended by SEOs — audit your redirect file frequently. Complex chains are more likely to result in a loss of referrer data, and you run the risk of UTM parameters getting stripped out.

Once again, control what you can: use carefully mapped (i.e. non-chained) code 301 server-side redirects to preserve referrer data wherever possible.

5. Non-web documents

Links in Microsoft Word documents, slide decks, or PDFs do not pass referrer information. By default, users who click these links will appear in your reports as direct traffic. Clicks from native mobile apps (particularly those with embedded "in-app" browsers) are similarly prone to stripping out referrer data.

To a degree, this is unavoidable. Much like so-called “dark social” visits (discussed in detail below), non-web links will inevitably result in some quantity of direct traffic. However, you also have an opportunity here to control the controllables.

If you publish whitepapers or offer downloadable PDF guides, for example, you should be tagging the embedded hyperlinks with UTM campaign parameters. You’d never even contemplate launching an email marketing campaign without campaign tracking (I hope), so why would you distribute any other kind of freebie without similarly tracking its success? In some ways this is even more important, since these kinds of downloadables often have a longevity not seen in a single email campaign. Here’s an example of a properly tagged URL which we would embed as a link:

http://ift.tt/2ifQkVi?..._medium=offline_document&utm_campaign=201711_utm_whitepaper

The same goes for URLs in your offline marketing materials. For major campaigns it’s common practice to select a short, memorable URL (e.g. moz.com/tv/) and design an entirely new landing page. It’s possible to bypass page creation altogether: simply redirect the vanity URL to an existing page URL which is properly tagged with UTM parameters.

So, whether you tag your URLs directly, use redirected vanity URLs, or — if you think UTM parameters are ugly — opt for some crazy-ass hash-fragment solution with GTM (read more here), the takeaway is the same: use campaign parameters wherever it’s appropriate to do so.

6. “Dark social”

This is a big one, and probably the least well understood by marketers.

The term “dark social” was first coined back in 2012 by Alexis Madrigal in an article for The Atlantic. Essentially it refers to methods of social sharing which cannot easily be attributed to a particular source, like email, instant messaging, Skype, WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger.

Recent studies have found that upwards of 80% of consumers’ outbound sharing from publishers’ and marketers’ websites now occurs via these private channels. In terms of numbers of active users, messaging apps are outpacing social networking apps. All the activity driven by these thriving platforms is typically bucketed as direct traffic by web analytics software.

People who use the ambiguous phrase “social media marketing” are typically referring to advertising: you broadcast your message and hope people will listen. Even if you overcome consumer indifference with a well-targeted campaign, any subsequent interactions are affected by their very public nature. The privacy of dark social, by contrast, represents a potential goldmine of intimate, targeted, and relevant interactions with high conversion potential. Nebulous and difficult-to-track though it may be, dark social has the potential to let marketers tap into elusive power of word of mouth.

So, how can we minimize the amount of dark social traffic which is bucketed under direct? The unfortunate truth is that there is no magic bullet: proper attribution of dark social requires rigorous campaign tracking. The optimal approach will vary greatly based on your industry, audience, proposition, and so on. For many websites, however, a good first step is to provide convenient and properly configured sharing buttons for private platforms like email, WhatsApp, and Slack, thereby ensuring that users share URLs appended with UTM parameters (or vanity/shortened URLs which redirect to the same). This will go some way towards shining a light on part of your dark social traffic.

Checklist: Minimizing direct traffic

To summarize what we’ve already discussed, here are the steps you can take to minimize the level of unnecessary direct traffic in your reports:

Migrate to HTTPS: Not only is the secure protocol your gateway to HTTP/2 and the future of the web, it will also have an enormously positive effect on your ability to track referral traffic.

Manage your use of redirects: Avoid chains and eliminate client-side redirection in favour of carefully-mapped, single-hop, server-side 301s. If you use vanity URLs to redirect to pages with UTM parameters, be meticulous.

Get really good at campaign tagging: Even amongst data-driven marketers I encounter the belief that UTM begins and ends with switching on automatic tagging in your email marketing software. Others go to the other extreme, doing silly things like tagging internal links. Control what you can, and your ability to carry out meaningful attribution will markedly improve.

Conduct an Analytics audit: Data integrity is vital, so consider this essential when assessing the success of your marketing. It’s not simply a case of checking for missing track code: good audits involve a review of your measurement plan and rigorous testing at page and property-level.

Adhere to these principles, and it’s often possible to achieve a dramatic reduction in the level of direct traffic reported in Analytics. The following example involved an HTTPS migration, GTM migration (as part of an Analytics review), and an overhaul of internal campaign tracking processes over the course of about 6 months:

But the saga of direct traffic doesn’t end there! Once this channel is “clean” — that is, once you’ve minimized the number of avoidable pollutants — what remains might actually be one of your most valuable traffic segments.

Analyze! Or: why direct traffic can actually be pretty cool

For reasons we’ve already discussed, traffic from bookmarks and dark social is an enormously valuable segment to analyze. These are likely to be some of your most loyal and engaged users, and it’s not uncommon to see a notably higher conversion rate for a clean direct channel compared to the site average. You should make the effort to get to know them.

The number of potential avenues to explore is infinite, but here are some good starting points:

Build meaningful custom segments, defining a subset of your direct traffic based on their landing page, location, device, repeat visit or purchase behavior, or even enhanced e-commerce interactions.

Track meaningful engagement metrics using modern GTM triggers such as element visibility and native scroll tracking. Measure how your direct users are using and viewing your content.

Watch for correlations with your other marketing activities, and use it as an opportunity to refine your tagging practices and segment definitions. Create a custom alert which watches for spikes in direct traffic.

Familiarize yourself with flow reports to get an understanding of how your direct traffic is converting. By using Goal Flow and Behavior Flow reports with segmentation, it’s often possible to glean actionable insights which can be applied to the site as a whole.

Ask your users for help! If you’ve isolated a valuable segment of traffic which eludes deeper analysis, add a button to the page offering visitors a free downloadable ebook if they tell you how they discovered your page.

Start thinking about lifetime value, if you haven’t already — overhauling your attribution model or implementing User ID are good steps towards overcoming the indifference or frustration felt by marketers towards direct traffic.

I hope this guide has been useful. With any luck, you arrived looking for ways to reduce the level of direct traffic in your reports, and left with some new ideas for how to better analyze this valuable segment of users.

Thanks for reading!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

[camerasieunhovn]

The Complete Guide to Direct Traffic in Google Analytics

Posted by tombennet

When it comes to direct traffic in Analytics, there are two deeply entrenched misconceptions.

The first is that it’s caused almost exclusively by users typing an address into their browser (or clicking on a bookmark). The second is that it’s a Bad Thing, not because it has any overt negative impact on your site’s performance, but rather because it’s somehow immune to further analysis. The prevailing attitude amongst digital marketers is that direct traffic is an unavoidable inconvenience; as a result, discussion of direct is typically limited to ways of attributing it to other channels, or side-stepping the issues associated with it.

In this article, we’ll be taking a fresh look at direct traffic in modern Google Analytics. As well as exploring the myriad ways in which referrer data can be lost, we’ll look at some tools and tactics you can start using immediately to reduce levels of direct traffic in your reports. Finally, we’ll discover how advanced analysis and segmentation can unlock the mysteries of direct traffic and shed light on what might actually be your most valuable users.

What is direct traffic?

In short, Google Analytics will report a traffic source of "direct" when it has no data on how the session arrived at your website, or when the referring source has been configured to be ignored. You can think of direct as GA’s fall-back option for when its processing logic has failed to attribute a session to a particular source.

To properly understand the causes and fixes for direct traffic, it’s important to understand exactly how GA processes traffic sources. The following flow-chart illustrates how sessions are bucketed — note that direct sits right at the end as a final "catch-all" group.

Broadly speaking, and disregarding user-configured overrides, GA’s processing follows this sequence of checks:

AdWords parameters > Campaign overrides > UTM campaign parameters > Referred by a search engine > Referred by another website > Previous campaign within timeout period > Direct

Note the penultimate processing step (previous campaign within timeout), which has a significant impact on the direct channel. Consider a user who discovers your site via organic search, then returns via direct a week later. Both sessions would be attributed to organic search. In fact, campaign data persists for up to six months by default. The key point here is that Google Analytics is already trying to minimize the impact of direct traffic for you.

What causes direct traffic?

Contrary to popular belief, there are actually many reasons why a session might be missing campaign and traffic source data. Here we will run through some of the most common.

1. Manual address entry and bookmarks

The classic direct-traffic scenario, this one is largely unavoidable. If a user types a URL into their browser’s address bar or clicks on a browser bookmark, that session will appear as direct traffic.

Simple as that.

2. HTTPS > HTTP

When a user follows a link on a secure (HTTPS) page to a non-secure (HTTP) page, no referrer data is passed, meaning the session appears as direct traffic instead of as a referral. Note that this is intended behavior. It’s part of how the secure protocol was designed, and it does not affect other scenarios: HTTP to HTTP, HTTPS to HTTPS, and even HTTP to HTTPS all pass referrer data.

So, if your referral traffic has tanked but direct has spiked, it could be that one of your major referrers has migrated to HTTPS. The inverse is also true: If you’ve migrated to HTTPS and are linking to HTTP websites, the traffic you’re driving to them will appear in their Analytics as direct.

If your referrers have moved to HTTPS and you’re stuck on HTTP, you really ought to consider migrating to HTTPS. Doing so (and updating your backlinks to point to HTTPS URLs) will bring back any referrer data which is being stripped from cross-protocol traffic. SSL certificates can now be obtained for free thanks to automated authorities like LetsEncrypt, but that’s not to say you should neglect to explore the potentially-significant SEO implications of site migrations. Remember, HTTPS and HTTP/2 are the future of the web.

If, on the other hand, you’ve already migrated to HTTPS and are concerned about your users appearing to partner websites as direct traffic, you can implement the meta referrer tag. Cyrus Shepard has written about this on Moz before, so I won’t delve into it now. Suffice to say, it’s a way of telling browsers to pass some referrer data to non-secure sites, and can be implemented as a <meta> element or HTTP header.

3. Missing or broken tracking code

Let’s say you’ve launched a new landing page template and forgotten to include the GA tracking code. Or, to use a scenario I’m encountering more and more frequently, imagine your GTM container is a horrible mess of poorly configured triggers, and your tracking code is simply failing to fire.

Users land on this page without tracking code. They click on a link to a deeper page which does have tracking code. From GA’s perspective, the first hit of the session is the second page visited, meaning that the referrer appears as your own website (i.e. a self-referral). If your domain is on the referral exclusion list (as per default configuration), the session is bucketed as direct. This will happen even if the first URL is tagged with UTM campaign parameters.

As a short-term fix, you can try to repair the damage by simply adding the missing tracking code. To prevent it happening again, carry out a thorough Analytics audit, move to a GTM-based tracking implementation, and promote a culture of data-driven marketing.

4. Improper redirection

This is an easy one. Don’t use meta refreshes or JavaScript-based redirects — these can wipe or replace referrer data, leading to direct traffic in Analytics. You should also be meticulous with your server-side redirects, and — as is often recommended by SEOs — audit your redirect file frequently. Complex chains are more likely to result in a loss of referrer data, and you run the risk of UTM parameters getting stripped out.

Once again, control what you can: use carefully mapped (i.e. non-chained) code 301 server-side redirects to preserve referrer data wherever possible.

5. Non-web documents

Links in Microsoft Word documents, slide decks, or PDFs do not pass referrer information. By default, users who click these links will appear in your reports as direct traffic. Clicks from native mobile apps (particularly those with embedded "in-app" browsers) are similarly prone to stripping out referrer data.

To a degree, this is unavoidable. Much like so-called “dark social” visits (discussed in detail below), non-web links will inevitably result in some quantity of direct traffic. However, you also have an opportunity here to control the controllables.

If you publish whitepapers or offer downloadable PDF guides, for example, you should be tagging the embedded hyperlinks with UTM campaign parameters. You’d never even contemplate launching an email marketing campaign without campaign tracking (I hope), so why would you distribute any other kind of freebie without similarly tracking its success? In some ways this is even more important, since these kinds of downloadables often have a longevity not seen in a single email campaign. Here’s an example of a properly tagged URL which we would embed as a link:

http://ift.tt/2ifQkVi?..._medium=offline_document&utm_campaign=201711_utm_whitepaper

The same goes for URLs in your offline marketing materials. For major campaigns it’s common practice to select a short, memorable URL (e.g. moz.com/tv/) and design an entirely new landing page. It’s possible to bypass page creation altogether: simply redirect the vanity URL to an existing page URL which is properly tagged with UTM parameters.

So, whether you tag your URLs directly, use redirected vanity URLs, or — if you think UTM parameters are ugly — opt for some crazy-ass hash-fragment solution with GTM (read more here), the takeaway is the same: use campaign parameters wherever it’s appropriate to do so.

6. “Dark social”

This is a big one, and probably the least well understood by marketers.

The term “dark social” was first coined back in 2012 by Alexis Madrigal in an article for The Atlantic. Essentially it refers to methods of social sharing which cannot easily be attributed to a particular source, like email, instant messaging, Skype, WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger.

Recent studies have found that upwards of 80% of consumers’ outbound sharing from publishers’ and marketers’ websites now occurs via these private channels. In terms of numbers of active users, messaging apps are outpacing social networking apps. All the activity driven by these thriving platforms is typically bucketed as direct traffic by web analytics software.

People who use the ambiguous phrase “social media marketing” are typically referring to advertising: you broadcast your message and hope people will listen. Even if you overcome consumer indifference with a well-targeted campaign, any subsequent interactions are affected by their very public nature. The privacy of dark social, by contrast, represents a potential goldmine of intimate, targeted, and relevant interactions with high conversion potential. Nebulous and difficult-to-track though it may be, dark social has the potential to let marketers tap into elusive power of word of mouth.

So, how can we minimize the amount of dark social traffic which is bucketed under direct? The unfortunate truth is that there is no magic bullet: proper attribution of dark social requires rigorous campaign tracking. The optimal approach will vary greatly based on your industry, audience, proposition, and so on. For many websites, however, a good first step is to provide convenient and properly configured sharing buttons for private platforms like email, WhatsApp, and Slack, thereby ensuring that users share URLs appended with UTM parameters (or vanity/shortened URLs which redirect to the same). This will go some way towards shining a light on part of your dark social traffic.

Checklist: Minimizing direct traffic

To summarize what we’ve already discussed, here are the steps you can take to minimize the level of unnecessary direct traffic in your reports:

Migrate to HTTPS: Not only is the secure protocol your gateway to HTTP/2 and the future of the web, it will also have an enormously positive effect on your ability to track referral traffic.

Manage your use of redirects: Avoid chains and eliminate client-side redirection in favour of carefully-mapped, single-hop, server-side 301s. If you use vanity URLs to redirect to pages with UTM parameters, be meticulous.

Get really good at campaign tagging: Even amongst data-driven marketers I encounter the belief that UTM begins and ends with switching on automatic tagging in your email marketing software. Others go to the other extreme, doing silly things like tagging internal links. Control what you can, and your ability to carry out meaningful attribution will markedly improve.

Conduct an Analytics audit: Data integrity is vital, so consider this essential when assessing the success of your marketing. It’s not simply a case of checking for missing track code: good audits involve a review of your measurement plan and rigorous testing at page and property-level.

Adhere to these principles, and it’s often possible to achieve a dramatic reduction in the level of direct traffic reported in Analytics. The following example involved an HTTPS migration, GTM migration (as part of an Analytics review), and an overhaul of internal campaign tracking processes over the course of about 6 months:

But the saga of direct traffic doesn’t end there! Once this channel is “clean” — that is, once you’ve minimized the number of avoidable pollutants — what remains might actually be one of your most valuable traffic segments.

Analyze! Or: why direct traffic can actually be pretty cool

For reasons we’ve already discussed, traffic from bookmarks and dark social is an enormously valuable segment to analyze. These are likely to be some of your most loyal and engaged users, and it’s not uncommon to see a notably higher conversion rate for a clean direct channel compared to the site average. You should make the effort to get to know them.

The number of potential avenues to explore is infinite, but here are some good starting points:

Build meaningful custom segments, defining a subset of your direct traffic based on their landing page, location, device, repeat visit or purchase behavior, or even enhanced e-commerce interactions.

Track meaningful engagement metrics using modern GTM triggers such as element visibility and native scroll tracking. Measure how your direct users are using and viewing your content.

Watch for correlations with your other marketing activities, and use it as an opportunity to refine your tagging practices and segment definitions. Create a custom alert which watches for spikes in direct traffic.

Familiarize yourself with flow reports to get an understanding of how your direct traffic is converting. By using Goal Flow and Behavior Flow reports with segmentation, it’s often possible to glean actionable insights which can be applied to the site as a whole.

Ask your users for help! If you’ve isolated a valuable segment of traffic which eludes deeper analysis, add a button to the page offering visitors a free downloadable ebook if they tell you how they discovered your page.

Start thinking about lifetime value, if you haven’t already — overhauling your attribution model or implementing User ID are good steps towards overcoming the indifference or frustration felt by marketers towards direct traffic.

I hope this guide has been useful. With any luck, you arrived looking for ways to reduce the level of direct traffic in your reports, and left with some new ideas for how to better analyze this valuable segment of users.

Thanks for reading!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

[catch22directory]

The Complete Guide to Direct Traffic in Google Analytics

Posted by tombennet

When it comes to direct traffic in Analytics, there are two deeply entrenched misconceptions.

The first is that it’s caused almost exclusively by users typing an address into their browser (or clicking on a bookmark). The second is that it’s a Bad Thing, not because it has any overt negative impact on your site’s performance, but rather because it’s somehow immune to further analysis. The prevailing attitude amongst digital marketers is that direct traffic is an unavoidable inconvenience; as a result, discussion of direct is typically limited to ways of attributing it to other channels, or side-stepping the issues associated with it.

In this article, we’ll be taking a fresh look at direct traffic in modern Google Analytics. As well as exploring the myriad ways in which referrer data can be lost, we’ll look at some tools and tactics you can start using immediately to reduce levels of direct traffic in your reports. Finally, we’ll discover how advanced analysis and segmentation can unlock the mysteries of direct traffic and shed light on what might actually be your most valuable users.

What is direct traffic?

In short, Google Analytics will report a traffic source of "direct" when it has no data on how the session arrived at your website, or when the referring source has been configured to be ignored. You can think of direct as GA’s fall-back option for when its processing logic has failed to attribute a session to a particular source.

To properly understand the causes and fixes for direct traffic, it’s important to understand exactly how GA processes traffic sources. The following flow-chart illustrates how sessions are bucketed — note that direct sits right at the end as a final "catch-all" group.

Broadly speaking, and disregarding user-configured overrides, GA’s processing follows this sequence of checks:

AdWords parameters > Campaign overrides > UTM campaign parameters > Referred by a search engine > Referred by another website > Previous campaign within timeout period > Direct

Note the penultimate processing step (previous campaign within timeout), which has a significant impact on the direct channel. Consider a user who discovers your site via organic search, then returns via direct a week later. Both sessions would be attributed to organic search. In fact, campaign data persists for up to six months by default. The key point here is that Google Analytics is already trying to minimize the impact of direct traffic for you.

What causes direct traffic?

Contrary to popular belief, there are actually many reasons why a session might be missing campaign and traffic source data. Here we will run through some of the most common.

1. Manual address entry and bookmarks

The classic direct-traffic scenario, this one is largely unavoidable. If a user types a URL into their browser’s address bar or clicks on a browser bookmark, that session will appear as direct traffic.

Simple as that.

2. HTTPS > HTTP

When a user follows a link on a secure (HTTPS) page to a non-secure (HTTP) page, no referrer data is passed, meaning the session appears as direct traffic instead of as a referral. Note that this is intended behavior. It’s part of how the secure protocol was designed, and it does not affect other scenarios: HTTP to HTTP, HTTPS to HTTPS, and even HTTP to HTTPS all pass referrer data.

So, if your referral traffic has tanked but direct has spiked, it could be that one of your major referrers has migrated to HTTPS. The inverse is also true: If you’ve migrated to HTTPS and are linking to HTTP websites, the traffic you’re driving to them will appear in their Analytics as direct.

If your referrers have moved to HTTPS and you’re stuck on HTTP, you really ought to consider migrating to HTTPS. Doing so (and updating your backlinks to point to HTTPS URLs) will bring back any referrer data which is being stripped from cross-protocol traffic. SSL certificates can now be obtained for free thanks to automated authorities like LetsEncrypt, but that’s not to say you should neglect to explore the potentially-significant SEO implications of site migrations. Remember, HTTPS and HTTP/2 are the future of the web.

If, on the other hand, you’ve already migrated to HTTPS and are concerned about your users appearing to partner websites as direct traffic, you can implement the meta referrer tag. Cyrus Shepard has written about this on Moz before, so I won’t delve into it now. Suffice to say, it’s a way of telling browsers to pass some referrer data to non-secure sites, and can be implemented as a <meta> element or HTTP header.

3. Missing or broken tracking code

Let’s say you’ve launched a new landing page template and forgotten to include the GA tracking code. Or, to use a scenario I’m encountering more and more frequently, imagine your GTM container is a horrible mess of poorly configured triggers, and your tracking code is simply failing to fire.

Users land on this page without tracking code. They click on a link to a deeper page which does have tracking code. From GA’s perspective, the first hit of the session is the second page visited, meaning that the referrer appears as your own website (i.e. a self-referral). If your domain is on the referral exclusion list (as per default configuration), the session is bucketed as direct. This will happen even if the first URL is tagged with UTM campaign parameters.

As a short-term fix, you can try to repair the damage by simply adding the missing tracking code. To prevent it happening again, carry out a thorough Analytics audit, move to a GTM-based tracking implementation, and promote a culture of data-driven marketing.

4. Improper redirection

This is an easy one. Don’t use meta refreshes or JavaScript-based redirects — these can wipe or replace referrer data, leading to direct traffic in Analytics. You should also be meticulous with your server-side redirects, and — as is often recommended by SEOs — audit your redirect file frequently. Complex chains are more likely to result in a loss of referrer data, and you run the risk of UTM parameters getting stripped out.

Once again, control what you can: use carefully mapped (i.e. non-chained) code 301 server-side redirects to preserve referrer data wherever possible.

5. Non-web documents

Links in Microsoft Word documents, slide decks, or PDFs do not pass referrer information. By default, users who click these links will appear in your reports as direct traffic. Clicks from native mobile apps (particularly those with embedded "in-app" browsers) are similarly prone to stripping out referrer data.

To a degree, this is unavoidable. Much like so-called “dark social” visits (discussed in detail below), non-web links will inevitably result in some quantity of direct traffic. However, you also have an opportunity here to control the controllables.

If you publish whitepapers or offer downloadable PDF guides, for example, you should be tagging the embedded hyperlinks with UTM campaign parameters. You’d never even contemplate launching an email marketing campaign without campaign tracking (I hope), so why would you distribute any other kind of freebie without similarly tracking its success? In some ways this is even more important, since these kinds of downloadables often have a longevity not seen in a single email campaign. Here’s an example of a properly tagged URL which we would embed as a link:

http://ift.tt/2ifQkVi?..._medium=offline_document&utm_campaign=201711_utm_whitepaper

The same goes for URLs in your offline marketing materials. For major campaigns it’s common practice to select a short, memorable URL (e.g. moz.com/tv/) and design an entirely new landing page. It’s possible to bypass page creation altogether: simply redirect the vanity URL to an existing page URL which is properly tagged with UTM parameters.

So, whether you tag your URLs directly, use redirected vanity URLs, or — if you think UTM parameters are ugly — opt for some crazy-ass hash-fragment solution with GTM (read more here), the takeaway is the same: use campaign parameters wherever it’s appropriate to do so.

6. “Dark social”

This is a big one, and probably the least well understood by marketers.

The term “dark social” was first coined back in 2012 by Alexis Madrigal in an article for The Atlantic. Essentially it refers to methods of social sharing which cannot easily be attributed to a particular source, like email, instant messaging, Skype, WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger.

Recent studies have found that upwards of 80% of consumers’ outbound sharing from publishers’ and marketers’ websites now occurs via these private channels. In terms of numbers of active users, messaging apps are outpacing social networking apps. All the activity driven by these thriving platforms is typically bucketed as direct traffic by web analytics software.

People who use the ambiguous phrase “social media marketing” are typically referring to advertising: you broadcast your message and hope people will listen. Even if you overcome consumer indifference with a well-targeted campaign, any subsequent interactions are affected by their very public nature. The privacy of dark social, by contrast, represents a potential goldmine of intimate, targeted, and relevant interactions with high conversion potential. Nebulous and difficult-to-track though it may be, dark social has the potential to let marketers tap into elusive power of word of mouth.

So, how can we minimize the amount of dark social traffic which is bucketed under direct? The unfortunate truth is that there is no magic bullet: proper attribution of dark social requires rigorous campaign tracking. The optimal approach will vary greatly based on your industry, audience, proposition, and so on. For many websites, however, a good first step is to provide convenient and properly configured sharing buttons for private platforms like email, WhatsApp, and Slack, thereby ensuring that users share URLs appended with UTM parameters (or vanity/shortened URLs which redirect to the same). This will go some way towards shining a light on part of your dark social traffic.

Checklist: Minimizing direct traffic

To summarize what we’ve already discussed, here are the steps you can take to minimize the level of unnecessary direct traffic in your reports:

Migrate to HTTPS: Not only is the secure protocol your gateway to HTTP/2 and the future of the web, it will also have an enormously positive effect on your ability to track referral traffic.

Manage your use of redirects: Avoid chains and eliminate client-side redirection in favour of carefully-mapped, single-hop, server-side 301s. If you use vanity URLs to redirect to pages with UTM parameters, be meticulous.

Get really good at campaign tagging: Even amongst data-driven marketers I encounter the belief that UTM begins and ends with switching on automatic tagging in your email marketing software. Others go to the other extreme, doing silly things like tagging internal links. Control what you can, and your ability to carry out meaningful attribution will markedly improve.

Conduct an Analytics audit: Data integrity is vital, so consider this essential when assessing the success of your marketing. It’s not simply a case of checking for missing track code: good audits involve a review of your measurement plan and rigorous testing at page and property-level.

Adhere to these principles, and it’s often possible to achieve a dramatic reduction in the level of direct traffic reported in Analytics. The following example involved an HTTPS migration, GTM migration (as part of an Analytics review), and an overhaul of internal campaign tracking processes over the course of about 6 months:

But the saga of direct traffic doesn’t end there! Once this channel is “clean” — that is, once you’ve minimized the number of avoidable pollutants — what remains might actually be one of your most valuable traffic segments.

Analyze! Or: why direct traffic can actually be pretty cool

For reasons we’ve already discussed, traffic from bookmarks and dark social is an enormously valuable segment to analyze. These are likely to be some of your most loyal and engaged users, and it’s not uncommon to see a notably higher conversion rate for a clean direct channel compared to the site average. You should make the effort to get to know them.

The number of potential avenues to explore is infinite, but here are some good starting points:

Build meaningful custom segments, defining a subset of your direct traffic based on their landing page, location, device, repeat visit or purchase behavior, or even enhanced e-commerce interactions.

Track meaningful engagement metrics using modern GTM triggers such as element visibility and native scroll tracking. Measure how your direct users are using and viewing your content.

Watch for correlations with your other marketing activities, and use it as an opportunity to refine your tagging practices and segment definitions. Create a custom alert which watches for spikes in direct traffic.

Familiarize yourself with flow reports to get an understanding of how your direct traffic is converting. By using Goal Flow and Behavior Flow reports with segmentation, it’s often possible to glean actionable insights which can be applied to the site as a whole.

Ask your users for help! If you’ve isolated a valuable segment of traffic which eludes deeper analysis, add a button to the page offering visitors a free downloadable ebook if they tell you how they discovered your page.

Start thinking about lifetime value, if you haven’t already — overhauling your attribution model or implementing User ID are good steps towards overcoming the indifference or frustration felt by marketers towards direct traffic.

I hope this guide has been useful. With any luck, you arrived looking for ways to reduce the level of direct traffic in your reports, and left with some new ideas for how to better analyze this valuable segment of users.

Thanks for reading!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

[luxuryltdcars]

The Complete Guide to Direct Traffic in Google Analytics

The Complete Guide to Direct Traffic in Google Analytics http://ift.tt/2AjhP7g

Posted by tombennet

When it comes to direct traffic in Analytics, there are two deeply entrenched misconceptions.

The first is that it’s caused almost exclusively by users typing an address into their browser (or clicking on a bookmark). The second is that it’s a Bad Thing, not because it has any overt negative impact on your site’s performance, but rather because it’s somehow immune to further analysis. The prevailing attitude amongst digital marketers is that direct traffic is an unavoidable inconvenience; as a result, discussion of direct is typically limited to ways of attributing it to other channels, or side-stepping the issues associated with it.

In this article, we’ll be taking a fresh look at direct traffic in modern Google Analytics. As well as exploring the myriad ways in which referrer data can be lost, we’ll look at some tools and tactics you can start using immediately to reduce levels of direct traffic in your reports. Finally, we’ll discover how advanced analysis and segmentation can unlock the mysteries of direct traffic and shed light on what might actually be your most valuable users.

What is direct traffic?

In short, Google Analytics will report a traffic source of "direct" when it has no data on how the session arrived at your website, or when the referring source has been configured to be ignored. You can think of direct as GA’s fall-back option for when its processing logic has failed to attribute a session to a particular source.

To properly understand the causes and fixes for direct traffic, it’s important to understand exactly how GA processes traffic sources. The following flow-chart illustrates how sessions are bucketed — note that direct sits right at the end as a final "catch-all" group.

Broadly speaking, and disregarding user-configured overrides, GA’s processing follows this sequence of checks:

AdWords parameters > Campaign overrides > UTM campaign parameters > Referred by a search engine > Referred by another website > Previous campaign within timeout period > Direct

Note the penultimate processing step (previous campaign within timeout), which has a significant impact on the direct channel. Consider a user who discovers your site via organic search, then returns via direct a week later. Both sessions would be attributed to organic search. In fact, campaign data persists for up to six months by default. The key point here is that Google Analytics is already trying to minimize the impact of direct traffic for you.

What causes direct traffic?

Contrary to popular belief, there are actually many reasons why a session might be missing campaign and traffic source data. Here we will run through some of the most common.

1. Manual address entry and bookmarks

The classic direct-traffic scenario, this one is largely unavoidable. If a user types a URL into their browser’s address bar or clicks on a browser bookmark, that session will appear as direct traffic.

Simple as that.

2. HTTPS > HTTP

When a user follows a link on a secure (HTTPS) page to a non-secure (HTTP) page, no referrer data is passed, meaning the session appears as direct traffic instead of as a referral. Note that this is intended behavior. It’s part of how the secure protocol was designed, and it does not affect other scenarios: HTTP to HTTP, HTTPS to HTTPS, and even HTTP to HTTPS all pass referrer data.

So, if your referral traffic has tanked but direct has spiked, it could be that one of your major referrers has migrated to HTTPS. The inverse is also true: If you’ve migrated to HTTPS and are linking to HTTP websites, the traffic you’re driving to them will appear in their Analytics as direct.

If your referrers have moved to HTTPS and you’re stuck on HTTP, you really ought to consider migrating to HTTPS. Doing so (and updating your backlinks to point to HTTPS URLs) will bring back any referrer data which is being stripped from cross-protocol traffic. SSL certificates can now be obtained for free thanks to automated authorities like LetsEncrypt, but that’s not to say you should neglect to explore the potentially-significant SEO implications of site migrations. Remember, HTTPS and HTTP/2 are the future of the web.

If, on the other hand, you’ve already migrated to HTTPS and are concerned about your users appearing to partner websites as direct traffic, you can implement the meta referrer tag. Cyrus Shepard has written about this on Moz before, so I won’t delve into it now. Suffice to say, it’s a way of telling browsers to pass some referrer data to non-secure sites, and can be implemented as a <meta> element or HTTP header.

3. Missing or broken tracking code

Let’s say you’ve launched a new landing page template and forgotten to include the GA tracking code. Or, to use a scenario I’m encountering more and more frequently, imagine your GTM container is a horrible mess of poorly configured triggers, and your tracking code is simply failing to fire.

Users land on this page without tracking code. They click on a link to a deeper page which does have tracking code. From GA’s perspective, the first hit of the session is the second page visited, meaning that the referrer appears as your own website (i.e. a self-referral). If your domain is on the referral exclusion list (as per default configuration), the session is bucketed as direct. This will happen even if the first URL is tagged with UTM campaign parameters.

As a short-term fix, you can try to repair the damage by simply adding the missing tracking code. To prevent it happening again, carry out a thorough Analytics audit, move to a GTM-based tracking implementation, and promote a culture of data-driven marketing.

4. Improper redirection

This is an easy one. Don’t use meta refreshes or JavaScript-based redirects — these can wipe or replace referrer data, leading to direct traffic in Analytics. You should also be meticulous with your server-side redirects, and — as is often recommended by SEOs — audit your redirect file frequently. Complex chains are more likely to result in a loss of referrer data, and you run the risk of UTM parameters getting stripped out.

Once again, control what you can: use carefully mapped (i.e. non-chained) code 301 server-side redirects to preserve referrer data wherever possible.

5. Non-web documents

Links in Microsoft Word documents, slide decks, or PDFs do not pass referrer information. By default, users who click these links will appear in your reports as direct traffic. Clicks from native mobile apps (particularly those with embedded "in-app" browsers) are similarly prone to stripping out referrer data.

To a degree, this is unavoidable. Much like so-called “dark social” visits (discussed in detail below), non-web links will inevitably result in some quantity of direct traffic. However, you also have an opportunity here to control the controllables.

If you publish whitepapers or offer downloadable PDF guides, for example, you should be tagging the embedded hyperlinks with UTM campaign parameters. You’d never even contemplate launching an email marketing campaign without campaign tracking (I hope), so why would you distribute any other kind of freebie without similarly tracking its success? In some ways this is even more important, since these kinds of downloadables often have a longevity not seen in a single email campaign. Here’s an example of a properly tagged URL which we would embed as a link:

http://ift.tt/2ifQkVi?..._medium=offline_document&utm_campaign=201711_utm_whitepaper

The same goes for URLs in your offline marketing materials. For major campaigns it’s common practice to select a short, memorable URL (e.g. moz.com/tv/) and design an entirely new landing page. It’s possible to bypass page creation altogether: simply redirect the vanity URL to an existing page URL which is properly tagged with UTM parameters.

So, whether you tag your URLs directly, use redirected vanity URLs, or — if you think UTM parameters are ugly — opt for some crazy-ass hash-fragment solution with GTM (read more here), the takeaway is the same: use campaign parameters wherever it’s appropriate to do so.

6. “Dark social”

This is a big one, and probably the least well understood by marketers.

The term “dark social” was first coined back in 2012 by Alexis Madrigal in an article for The Atlantic. Essentially it refers to methods of social sharing which cannot easily be attributed to a particular source, like email, instant messaging, Skype, WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger.

Recent studies have found that upwards of 80% of consumers’ outbound sharing from publishers’ and marketers’ websites now occurs via these private channels. In terms of numbers of active users, messaging apps are outpacing social networking apps. All the activity driven by these thriving platforms is typically bucketed as direct traffic by web analytics software.

People who use the ambiguous phrase “social media marketing” are typically referring to advertising: you broadcast your message and hope people will listen. Even if you overcome consumer indifference with a well-targeted campaign, any subsequent interactions are affected by their very public nature. The privacy of dark social, by contrast, represents a potential goldmine of intimate, targeted, and relevant interactions with high conversion potential. Nebulous and difficult-to-track though it may be, dark social has the potential to let marketers tap into elusive power of word of mouth.

So, how can we minimize the amount of dark social traffic which is bucketed under direct? The unfortunate truth is that there is no magic bullet: proper attribution of dark social requires rigorous campaign tracking. The optimal approach will vary greatly based on your industry, audience, proposition, and so on. For many websites, however, a good first step is to provide convenient and properly configured sharing buttons for private platforms like email, WhatsApp, and Slack, thereby ensuring that users share URLs appended with UTM parameters (or vanity/shortened URLs which redirect to the same). This will go some way towards shining a light on part of your dark social traffic.

Checklist: Minimizing direct traffic

To summarize what we’ve already discussed, here are the steps you can take to minimize the level of unnecessary direct traffic in your reports:

Migrate to HTTPS: Not only is the secure protocol your gateway to HTTP/2 and the future of the web, it will also have an enormously positive effect on your ability to track referral traffic.

Manage your use of redirects: Avoid chains and eliminate client-side redirection in favour of carefully-mapped, single-hop, server-side 301s. If you use vanity URLs to redirect to pages with UTM parameters, be meticulous.

Get really good at campaign tagging: Even amongst data-driven marketers I encounter the belief that UTM begins and ends with switching on automatic tagging in your email marketing software. Others go to the other extreme, doing silly things like tagging internal links. Control what you can, and your ability to carry out meaningful attribution will markedly improve.

Conduct an Analytics audit: Data integrity is vital, so consider this essential when assessing the success of your marketing. It’s not simply a case of checking for missing track code: good audits involve a review of your measurement plan and rigorous testing at page and property-level.

Adhere to these principles, and it’s often possible to achieve a dramatic reduction in the level of direct traffic reported in Analytics. The following example involved an HTTPS migration, GTM migration (as part of an Analytics review), and an overhaul of internal campaign tracking processes over the course of about 6 months:

But the saga of direct traffic doesn’t end there! Once this channel is “clean” — that is, once you’ve minimized the number of avoidable pollutants — what remains might actually be one of your most valuable traffic segments.

Analyze! Or: why direct traffic can actually be pretty cool

For reasons we’ve already discussed, traffic from bookmarks and dark social is an enormously valuable segment to analyze. These are likely to be some of your most loyal and engaged users, and it’s not uncommon to see a notably higher conversion rate for a clean direct channel compared to the site average. You should make the effort to get to know them.

The number of potential avenues to explore is infinite, but here are some good starting points:

Build meaningful custom segments, defining a subset of your direct traffic based on their landing page, location, device, repeat visit or purchase behavior, or even enhanced e-commerce interactions.

Track meaningful engagement metrics using modern GTM triggers such as element visibility and native scroll tracking. Measure how your direct users are using and viewing your content.

Watch for correlations with your other marketing activities, and use it as an opportunity to refine your tagging practices and segment definitions. Create a custom alert which watches for spikes in direct traffic.

Familiarize yourself with flow reports to get an understanding of how your direct traffic is converting. By using Goal Flow and Behavior Flow reports with segmentation, it’s often possible to glean actionable insights which can be applied to the site as a whole.

Ask your users for help! If you’ve isolated a valuable segment of traffic which eludes deeper analysis, add a button to the page offering visitors a free downloadable ebook if they tell you how they discovered your page.

Start thinking about lifetime value, if you haven’t already — overhauling your attribution model or implementing User ID are good steps towards overcoming the indifference or frustration felt by marketers towards direct traffic.

I hope this guide has been useful. With any luck, you arrived looking for ways to reduce the level of direct traffic in your reports, and left with some new ideas for how to better analyze this valuable segment of users.

Thanks for reading!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

[pacifichealth]

The Complete Guide to Direct Traffic in Google Analytics

Posted by tombennet

When it comes to direct traffic in Analytics, there are two deeply entrenched misconceptions.

The first is that it’s caused almost exclusively by users typing an address into their browser (or clicking on a bookmark). The second is that it’s a Bad Thing, not because it has any overt negative impact on your site’s performance, but rather because it’s somehow immune to further analysis. The prevailing attitude amongst digital marketers is that direct traffic is an unavoidable inconvenience; as a result, discussion of direct is typically limited to ways of attributing it to other channels, or side-stepping the issues associated with it.

In this article, we’ll be taking a fresh look at direct traffic in modern Google Analytics. As well as exploring the myriad ways in which referrer data can be lost, we’ll look at some tools and tactics you can start using immediately to reduce levels of direct traffic in your reports. Finally, we’ll discover how advanced analysis and segmentation can unlock the mysteries of direct traffic and shed light on what might actually be your most valuable users.

What is direct traffic?

In short, Google Analytics will report a traffic source of "direct" when it has no data on how the session arrived at your website, or when the referring source has been configured to be ignored. You can think of direct as GA’s fall-back option for when its processing logic has failed to attribute a session to a particular source.

To properly understand the causes and fixes for direct traffic, it’s important to understand exactly how GA processes traffic sources. The following flow-chart illustrates how sessions are bucketed — note that direct sits right at the end as a final "catch-all" group.

Broadly speaking, and disregarding user-configured overrides, GA’s processing follows this sequence of checks:

AdWords parameters > Campaign overrides > UTM campaign parameters > Referred by a search engine > Referred by another website > Previous campaign within timeout period > Direct

Note the penultimate processing step (previous campaign within timeout), which has a significant impact on the direct channel. Consider a user who discovers your site via organic search, then returns via direct a week later. Both sessions would be attributed to organic search. In fact, campaign data persists for up to six months by default. The key point here is that Google Analytics is already trying to minimize the impact of direct traffic for you.

What causes direct traffic?

Contrary to popular belief, there are actually many reasons why a session might be missing campaign and traffic source data. Here we will run through some of the most common.

1. Manual address entry and bookmarks

The classic direct-traffic scenario, this one is largely unavoidable. If a user types a URL into their browser’s address bar or clicks on a browser bookmark, that session will appear as direct traffic.

Simple as that.

2. HTTPS > HTTP

When a user follows a link on a secure (HTTPS) page to a non-secure (HTTP) page, no referrer data is passed, meaning the session appears as direct traffic instead of as a referral. Note that this is intended behavior. It’s part of how the secure protocol was designed, and it does not affect other scenarios: HTTP to HTTP, HTTPS to HTTPS, and even HTTP to HTTPS all pass referrer data.

So, if your referral traffic has tanked but direct has spiked, it could be that one of your major referrers has migrated to HTTPS. The inverse is also true: If you’ve migrated to HTTPS and are linking to HTTP websites, the traffic you’re driving to them will appear in their Analytics as direct.

If your referrers have moved to HTTPS and you’re stuck on HTTP, you really ought to consider migrating to HTTPS. Doing so (and updating your backlinks to point to HTTPS URLs) will bring back any referrer data which is being stripped from cross-protocol traffic. SSL certificates can now be obtained for free thanks to automated authorities like LetsEncrypt, but that’s not to say you should neglect to explore the potentially-significant SEO implications of site migrations. Remember, HTTPS and HTTP/2 are the future of the web.

If, on the other hand, you’ve already migrated to HTTPS and are concerned about your users appearing to partner websites as direct traffic, you can implement the meta referrer tag. Cyrus Shepard has written about this on Moz before, so I won’t delve into it now. Suffice to say, it’s a way of telling browsers to pass some referrer data to non-secure sites, and can be implemented as a <meta> element or HTTP header.

3. Missing or broken tracking code

Let’s say you’ve launched a new landing page template and forgotten to include the GA tracking code. Or, to use a scenario I’m encountering more and more frequently, imagine your GTM container is a horrible mess of poorly configured triggers, and your tracking code is simply failing to fire.

Users land on this page without tracking code. They click on a link to a deeper page which does have tracking code. From GA’s perspective, the first hit of the session is the second page visited, meaning that the referrer appears as your own website (i.e. a self-referral). If your domain is on the referral exclusion list (as per default configuration), the session is bucketed as direct. This will happen even if the first URL is tagged with UTM campaign parameters.

As a short-term fix, you can try to repair the damage by simply adding the missing tracking code. To prevent it happening again, carry out a thorough Analytics audit, move to a GTM-based tracking implementation, and promote a culture of data-driven marketing.

4. Improper redirection

This is an easy one. Don’t use meta refreshes or JavaScript-based redirects — these can wipe or replace referrer data, leading to direct traffic in Analytics. You should also be meticulous with your server-side redirects, and — as is often recommended by SEOs — audit your redirect file frequently. Complex chains are more likely to result in a loss of referrer data, and you run the risk of UTM parameters getting stripped out.

Once again, control what you can: use carefully mapped (i.e. non-chained) code 301 server-side redirects to preserve referrer data wherever possible.

5. Non-web documents

Links in Microsoft Word documents, slide decks, or PDFs do not pass referrer information. By default, users who click these links will appear in your reports as direct traffic. Clicks from native mobile apps (particularly those with embedded "in-app" browsers) are similarly prone to stripping out referrer data.

To a degree, this is unavoidable. Much like so-called “dark social” visits (discussed in detail below), non-web links will inevitably result in some quantity of direct traffic. However, you also have an opportunity here to control the controllables.

If you publish whitepapers or offer downloadable PDF guides, for example, you should be tagging the embedded hyperlinks with UTM campaign parameters. You’d never even contemplate launching an email marketing campaign without campaign tracking (I hope), so why would you distribute any other kind of freebie without similarly tracking its success? In some ways this is even more important, since these kinds of downloadables often have a longevity not seen in a single email campaign. Here’s an example of a properly tagged URL which we would embed as a link:

http://ift.tt/2ifQkVi?..._medium=offline_document&utm_campaign=201711_utm_whitepaper

The same goes for URLs in your offline marketing materials. For major campaigns it’s common practice to select a short, memorable URL (e.g. moz.com/tv/) and design an entirely new landing page. It’s possible to bypass page creation altogether: simply redirect the vanity URL to an existing page URL which is properly tagged with UTM parameters.

So, whether you tag your URLs directly, use redirected vanity URLs, or — if you think UTM parameters are ugly — opt for some crazy-ass hash-fragment solution with GTM (read more here), the takeaway is the same: use campaign parameters wherever it’s appropriate to do so.

6. “Dark social”

This is a big one, and probably the least well understood by marketers.

The term “dark social” was first coined back in 2012 by Alexis Madrigal in an article for The Atlantic. Essentially it refers to methods of social sharing which cannot easily be attributed to a particular source, like email, instant messaging, Skype, WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger.

Recent studies have found that upwards of 80% of consumers’ outbound sharing from publishers’ and marketers’ websites now occurs via these private channels. In terms of numbers of active users, messaging apps are outpacing social networking apps. All the activity driven by these thriving platforms is typically bucketed as direct traffic by web analytics software.

People who use the ambiguous phrase “social media marketing” are typically referring to advertising: you broadcast your message and hope people will listen. Even if you overcome consumer indifference with a well-targeted campaign, any subsequent interactions are affected by their very public nature. The privacy of dark social, by contrast, represents a potential goldmine of intimate, targeted, and relevant interactions with high conversion potential. Nebulous and difficult-to-track though it may be, dark social has the potential to let marketers tap into elusive power of word of mouth.

So, how can we minimize the amount of dark social traffic which is bucketed under direct? The unfortunate truth is that there is no magic bullet: proper attribution of dark social requires rigorous campaign tracking. The optimal approach will vary greatly based on your industry, audience, proposition, and so on. For many websites, however, a good first step is to provide convenient and properly configured sharing buttons for private platforms like email, WhatsApp, and Slack, thereby ensuring that users share URLs appended with UTM parameters (or vanity/shortened URLs which redirect to the same). This will go some way towards shining a light on part of your dark social traffic.

Checklist: Minimizing direct traffic

To summarize what we’ve already discussed, here are the steps you can take to minimize the level of unnecessary direct traffic in your reports:

Migrate to HTTPS: Not only is the secure protocol your gateway to HTTP/2 and the future of the web, it will also have an enormously positive effect on your ability to track referral traffic.

Manage your use of redirects: Avoid chains and eliminate client-side redirection in favour of carefully-mapped, single-hop, server-side 301s. If you use vanity URLs to redirect to pages with UTM parameters, be meticulous.

Get really good at campaign tagging: Even amongst data-driven marketers I encounter the belief that UTM begins and ends with switching on automatic tagging in your email marketing software. Others go to the other extreme, doing silly things like tagging internal links. Control what you can, and your ability to carry out meaningful attribution will markedly improve.

Conduct an Analytics audit: Data integrity is vital, so consider this essential when assessing the success of your marketing. It’s not simply a case of checking for missing track code: good audits involve a review of your measurement plan and rigorous testing at page and property-level.

Adhere to these principles, and it’s often possible to achieve a dramatic reduction in the level of direct traffic reported in Analytics. The following example involved an HTTPS migration, GTM migration (as part of an Analytics review), and an overhaul of internal campaign tracking processes over the course of about 6 months:

But the saga of direct traffic doesn’t end there! Once this channel is “clean” — that is, once you’ve minimized the number of avoidable pollutants — what remains might actually be one of your most valuable traffic segments.

Analyze! Or: why direct traffic can actually be pretty cool

For reasons we’ve already discussed, traffic from bookmarks and dark social is an enormously valuable segment to analyze. These are likely to be some of your most loyal and engaged users, and it’s not uncommon to see a notably higher conversion rate for a clean direct channel compared to the site average. You should make the effort to get to know them.

The number of potential avenues to explore is infinite, but here are some good starting points:

Build meaningful custom segments, defining a subset of your direct traffic based on their landing page, location, device, repeat visit or purchase behavior, or even enhanced e-commerce interactions.

Track meaningful engagement metrics using modern GTM triggers such as element visibility and native scroll tracking. Measure how your direct users are using and viewing your content.

Watch for correlations with your other marketing activities, and use it as an opportunity to refine your tagging practices and segment definitions. Create a custom alert which watches for spikes in direct traffic.

Familiarize yourself with flow reports to get an understanding of how your direct traffic is converting. By using Goal Flow and Behavior Flow reports with segmentation, it’s often possible to glean actionable insights which can be applied to the site as a whole.

Ask your users for help! If you’ve isolated a valuable segment of traffic which eludes deeper analysis, add a button to the page offering visitors a free downloadable ebook if they tell you how they discovered your page.

Start thinking about lifetime value, if you haven’t already — overhauling your attribution model or implementing User ID are good steps towards overcoming the indifference or frustration felt by marketers towards direct traffic.

I hope this guide has been useful. With any luck, you arrived looking for ways to reduce the level of direct traffic in your reports, and left with some new ideas for how to better analyze this valuable segment of users.

Thanks for reading!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!