How to Reduce Direct Traffic in Google Analytics

#2. Your cookie consent solution is losing the traffic source

If you have implemented a cookie-consent banner on your website because of GDPR or some other privacy regulation AND a visitor gives consent just on the 2nd (or subsequent) pageview, that session will be treated as a (direct).

Why?

Because the traffic source is available only on the first pageview (if we are talking about regular websites, not single-page applications).

Here’s a situation. A visitor lands on your site (the URL might contain UTMs or maybe the referrer of the previous website is available). Once the visitor goes to the next page, the URL changes and your UTMs are now gone. Also, the value of the referrer will change. Now that referrer’s value contains your landing page’s URL (because that is the previous page). GA will treat this as a self-referral, meaning that your session’s traffic source is (direct).

So, what are the exact situations where this problem is possible?

• Your cookie consent popup/bar is not eye-catchy and the visitor just ignores it, thus continues browsing (and then you lose your traffic source)
• I have also seen some cases of poorly implemented solutions where the visitor (immediately after consent was given) is redirected to some other page, hence the referrer/other parameters are also lost.

What to do in this case?

First, just to save myself, I will post the usual “I am not a lawyer, you should discuss this with your legal department”. Alright, now we can continue.

I would suggest that:

• Your cookie consent popup/bar should not redirect visitors anywhere after they give consent. Just let them browse further and fire your tracking codes accordingly.
• Your cookie consent popup must be visible and get all the attention once the visitor lands on a site. The visitor should make his/her choice right away – to accept or decline. Your goal is to get that choice on the first pageview.

#3. UTMs with errors

It is a normal practice to mark your URLs with additional parameters called UTM (utm_medium, utm_source, utm_campaign, utm_term, utm_content).

If the visitor lands on your website and the URL contains those parameters, GA will attribute that session to the traffic source that is mentioned in those parameters.

Usually, these parameters are used in email marketing, social media posts, paid advertising, custom channels (like ebooks), etc.

But here’s the catch. If you want the UTMs to properly work, they must be properly formatted:

• It is recommended that UTM parameters go in the URL after the question mark (while it is possible to also use UTMs after the #, that is not recommended). Example: mysite.com?utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com
• Different parameters must be connected with an ampersand (&)
• UTM parameter names must be exactly like this:
  • utm_medium
  • utm_source
  • utm_campaign
  • utm_term
  • utm_content
  • Other variations (like utmMedium, etc.) will not work.

So, where is the problem? Quite often, I see typos or just a poor configuration in GA reports.

If the visitor lands on your website and the Referrer’s value is empty but the URL contains UTM parameters, that session will be attributed to some traffic source (that is described in those UTMs). But if UTMs are incorrect (I mean, they are formatted incorrectly), that session will be attributed to (direct).

The easiest way to check if your UTMs are broken is to go to the Landing Page report in Google Analytics (go to Behavior > Site Content > Landing Pages).

If UTMs are correct, they will not be displayed in the Page URLs. GA just reads them, attribute to the correct traffic source and that’s it. UTMs will not be displayed as the part of the URL.

But if you or your colleagues added them to the URL incorrectly, you will see them in your reports.

In that Landing Pages report, click “Advanced” next to the search bar.

Then enter the following filters:

• Include Source/Medium containing (direct) / (none)
• and Include Landing Page containing utm

Did the report return something? Yes? Then here you have your broken UTMs. Do your best to fix them and contact the people responsible for some of those UTMs, and ask them to fix it.

How can you find those people? You’ll have to play a detective and figure that stuff on your own.

Other things to search in that very same report (but not limited to):

• medium
• source
• #

I hope you get the idea.

#4. Affiliate links with no referrer or UTMs

Is your business running an affiliate program? If yes, chances are that at least part of your affiliate links is coming in as direct traffic.

In GA, go to Behavior > Content > Landing Pages. Let’s say that all of your affiliate links contain the URL parameter affiliate_id. Example: mysite.com?affiliate_id=123123.

Now, let’s enter “affiliate_id” (without quotation marks) to the search bar of the Landing Page report. Note: if your affiliate ID parameter is different, enter YOUR parameter there (e.g. aID, affID, partner_id, etc.).

The report will return the list of landing pages that contained the affiliate_id parameter.

Now, add the secondary dimension Source/Medium. Finally, open the advanced search in GA and enter the following condition: Include Source/Medium containing (direct).

As a result, you will get a list of all sessions from your affiliates that are treated as (direct) in Google Analytics.

A quick fix is to create several variables and overwrite campaign data in Google Analytics tags. If the URL contains affiliate_id, then we’ll manually set the traffic source to be utm_medium=affiliate and utm_source to be the actual ID of an affiliate that drove those visitors to your site).

Create the first one (name this variable cjs – campaignMedium):

function() {
 return window.location.href.indexOf('affiliate_id') > -1 ? 'affiliate' : undefined;
}

If your affiliate parameter is different (not the affiliate_id), insert it in the code above (instead of the affiliate_id)

The 2nd variable (name this variable cjs – campaignSource):

function() {
 return window.location.href.indexOf('affiliate_id') > -1 ? {{url - affiliate_id}} : undefined;
}

For the 2nd variable to work, you need to create a URL variable in Google Tag Manager with the following settings:

The name of that variable must strictly be url – affiliate_id. If your affiliate ID parameter’s name is different, use that one instead. But make sure the replace it in all of the variables above.

Finally, go to your Google Analytics settings variable > More Settings > Field to set and add two new fields (as I have displayed that in the screenshot below). Field names are case-sensitive.

In the value field of the campaignMedium, I’ve inserted the first Custom JS variable we’ve recently created. And in the campaignSource field, I’ve inserted the 2nd Custom JS variable.

#5. URL shorteners

If you are using link shorteners, they might lose the referrer, hence no traffic source data. What you could do is to add UTMs to the final destination URL.

For example, instead of inserting “https://www.mywebsite.com/some-landing-page“, you could insert “https://www.mywebsite.com/ some-landing-page?utm_medium=……” (replace the dots with the actual UTM parameters).

That way, even if the referrer is not available, UTMs will properly indicate the traffic source to Google Analytics.

I have no quick ways to audit short links, thus you will probably need to review/update them one by one in your link shortener platform/app.

#6. Links in non-web documents are missing UTMs

If your visitors/users can download files like ebooks (and those files are in PDF or some other rich format), those files might contain links to your website, right?

When a visitor clicks any of those links, the referrer is not available. Ever. Even if you open PDFs with Chrome, the referrer is not available.

A solution? All links in your PDFs and similar files should contain UTM parameters.

If you already have a bunch of ebooks published and none of them contain UTMs in links, you will need to manually update them. If many people have already downloaded your ebooks, you cannot change links those files.

Speaking of naming convention, one of the ideas could be like this:

• utm_medium=pdf
• utm_source=[type of content], for example, utm_source=ebook, utm_source=checklist, etc.
• utm_campaign=[name of the document], for example, utm_campaign=very-cool-ebook.