The Difference Between Direct and Organic Search Traffic Sources

For a long time, digital marketers summed up the properties of direct and organic traffic pretty similarly and simply. To most, organic traffic consists of visits from search engines, while direct traffic is made up of visits from people entering your company URL into their browser.

This explanation, however, is too simplified and leaves most digital marketers short-handed when it comes to completely understanding and gaining insights from web traffic, especially organic and direct sources.

Beyond organic and direct traffic, you must understand the difference between all of your traffic sources and how traffic is classified. Most web analytics platforms, like Google Analytics, utilize an algorithm and flowchart based on the referring website or parameters set within the URL that determines the source of traffic. Here is a breakdown of all sources:

• Referral: Traffic that occurs when a user finds you through a site other than a major search engine
• Social: Traffic from a social network, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, or Instagram
• Organic: Traffic from search engine results that is earned, not paid
• Paid search: Traffic from search engine results that is the result of paid advertising via Google AdWords or another paid search platform
• Email: Traffic from email marketing that has been properly tagged with an email parameter
• Other: If traffic does not fit into another source or has been tagged as “Other” via a URL parameter, it will be bucketed into “Other” traffic.
• Direct: Any traffic where the referrer or source is unknown.

With that in mind, let’s dig into the specifics of two very important sources: direct and organic traffic . . .