I get 72% of my traffic from direct address/bookmarks. Can this be real?

[streety]

I've been going through my traffic stats today and looking at where my visitors come from and I find that 72% come from direct address/bookmarks, 10% from the search engines (8% google) and 17% come from links on external pages.

The ratio between SEs and external links is believable as although I rank well for some keyphrases they're obscure whereas I appear high up in the listing for more popular searches on sites like hotscripts. The problem I have is with the direct links.

Although it would be nice to think that my visitors are passing my url around to their friends in emails and instant messages I don't really believe that this can account for all these visits.

Does anyone else have suspiciously high direct links? Is it actually a common phenomenon and I just wasn't aware of it?

Getting more into the details I was viewing my stats using Awstats. Are there any more reliable tools available that can easily be integrated into an existing website?

[Jean-Luc]

Hi,

The confusion comes from the way AWStats counts the referrers. There are three things to know:
- AWStats counts a referrer for each page that is viewed and for each hit, while you probably expect to only count a referrer for each visit.
- AWStats disregards internal referrers (when going from page A of your site to page B of your site).
- every hit from a web client that hides referrers is counted as "direct address/bookmarks".

The result of this AWStats weird way of counting referrers is that the percentage of "direct address/bookmarks" is overestimated if you look at it as a percentage of visits. I have tried to build a tool to correct this here: AWStats referrers - visits (http://www.internetofficer.com/awstats/referrers-visits.html).

Jean-Luc

[streety]

That's great Jean-Luc, very useful (I given you rep).

Using your tool I get a more realistic 21% for SEs and 36% from other websites.