zeborah: Map of New Zealand with a zebra salient (Default)
zeborah ([personal profile] zeborah) wrote in [personal profile] jimhines 2016-03-09 05:40 am (UTC)

On analytics, "direct" usually just means that it doesn't have referrer information. This could mean that:
* the person following the link is security conscious and has told their browser not to send any referring data along with header requests
* instead of clicking the link, the person copied and pasted it into a new tab/window
* the person emailed it to someone who clicked it
* the person bookmarked it and clicked it later
* if the analytics coding is very crude, possibly even the link got shared on some other site and the code can't be bothered reporting that specifically and instead claims 'direct'. Dedicated analytics reports (like Google Analytics or Statcounter) wouldn't do that but idk about Payhip.

tl;dr - In practice, "Direct" doesn't actually mean "Direct", it means "Don't know".

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