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.
