Thank you for your suggestion. It’s on my list (as many other things) and as soon as I have the time, I will update it or write a new article about it.

Hi Lukas,
It really depends on your website and how you are generating traffic, but it is definitely possible to have a non-homepage ranking in first position.
You can cross-segment your data to channel to see what channels are driving traffic to this page (and compare it to the homepage) to get a better understanding of what is going on.

Best,
Paul

Hi Nyk,

There can be many reasons for this change.
Is there an overall traffic increase that is mainly caused by direct traffic or do you see less traffic in other channels?
Do you think this direct traffic increase comes from real visitors or potentially bots? Not sure whether bot traffic could influence your CPC here, but it might be wise to block it (if possible). I am not working with Adsense so I am not sure about other factors currently.

Best,
Paul

Thanks for the great info. Since last two months I am noticing the graph going up for the direct traffic. Usually direct traffic used to be 5 to 10 on my website but it has picked up since last two months. Unfortunately, I am also noticing its effect on my adsense revenue as I started getting low CPC of 0.12 which is used to be higher than 0.60.

Could you suggest anything that can help me to curb this direct traffic?

Thanks

If your CPC data is appearing in your reports as organic or direct traffic, it’s likely due to improperly tagged or untagged destination URLs in your ads. If you haven’t manually tagged your URLs, please enable Destination URL auto-tagging in your Google Ads account.

Hi Guinness,

Thanks for the heads up!
This is because visitors already have a cookie that carry source/medium “organic” when they click on those email links. Direct won’t overwrite organic traffic is this case.
Great article to learn more: https://www.e-nor.com/blog/google-analytics/direct-visits-google-analytics-attribution-precedence.
Also, why wouldn’t you want to tag these links with UTM (email) parameters?

Best,
Paul

thank you for the article – excellent structured, pretty comprehensive, well explained how to clean up the direct traffic. However, I faced with the opposite situation – traffic which should be attributed as direct appears in the GA reports as organic. Clients receive emails with links (not tagged with UTM parameters) to service pages (closed for indexing) on the website and make the transition to them to make the payment, approve quotes, etc. That is obviously direct traffic.

Nevertheless, around 10-12% of this kind of traffic counted as organic. And what interesting, some pages appearing in both reports – as organic and direct. Honestly, I’m confused.

Can you help me with this?

Thank you in advance.