: What could cause a drop in direct traffic (all other sources remain constant)? One of my sites has shown a significant drop in direct traffic. Organic and Referral traffic remain relatively constant.

@Berumen354

After investigating further when I noticed that two other sites were also seeing the same issue (in the same GA account), i looked at 'by technology - browser' as a secondary dimension and noticed that Yottaa was the issue. Their basic site monitoring service was contributing to direct traffic and they made a change mid July which obviously affected reporting by GA.

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@Lee4591628

There could be side-effects like:


removal of old pages that were bookmarked
start of Olympic games in London (27 Jul)

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@Fox8124981

It's only a drop of about 30/40 visits. I'd attribute this to summer holidays. Your visitors who normally visit your site directly are probably tanning themselves on a beach somewhere. If it doesn't grow again towards the middle of September you should check your server logs and compare it against your Google Analytics to make sure it's not a problem with GA.

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@Frith620

The only thing I can think of is, since you've had a DNS change, is all the A records are not set up!

So you may still have domain.com working but domain.com and sub.domain.com do not work (which was a link).

Or any type of URL change - it could be the most popular page URL was domain.com/popularpage.html has been updated to domain.com/popualrpage.aspx (or similar).

Or if any forwarders are in place, this would make you your own referer and as such that is not direct (at least, Yahoo Analytics, Index Tools, and Going Up used to measure this way)._

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