Wednesday 18 January 2017

Google Home App Traffic Regarded as Direct Traffic




It has been revealed that Google Analytics reads the clicks from the Google Home app as direct traffic. 

The Theory:

When you ask something to the Google Home device, it responds with a direct answer, ever wondered where does it fetch that information from? The answers usually come from the information contained on a web page in the Google’s index. 

In the Google Home companion app, within the Discover tab, you can find a history of your recent queries and a link to the website where the direct answer was sourced from. 

By selecting the ‘Visit Website’ button, you will be directed to the original source. Google Analytics should perhaps be considering this traffic as organic traffic because the website was at first discovered using a Google search.


Direct traffic is usually counted only when someone manually enters a URL into the address bar of their browser, which makes this discovery a bit of a quirk. Google may adjust this in future, but for the time being, Google is considering all the traffic from the Google Home app as direct traffic. 

Remember as you monitor your analytics an increase in the direct traffic could very well mean that more and more people are using the Google Home app to find you.

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