I have been tracking my own website zenovay.com for about 30 days now. Here is what the channel breakdown looks like:
Direct: 402
Organic Search: 24
Referral: 2
Organic Social: 1
Paid Search: 1
Paid Social: 1
94% Direct. on a site I was actively promoting on Reddit, X, Indie Hackers, and a bunch of Slack and Discord communities during that same period. that felt way too high so I started poking around.
First thing I realized is dark social is eating my attribution alive. Every link I dropped in slack channels, Discord servers, DMs, private newsletters, none of that carries a referrer header. It all gets dumped into direct. I estimate at least half of that direct bucket is actually community traffic that just can't be attributed properly. Which means I have no idea which community is actually driving results and which ones I am wasting time in.
Second thing that jumped out was singapore showing up as one of my top countries with 50 visits. I have zero audience there. Never promoted there. Never even thought about that market.
Pulled up the session data and it was obvious. Single pageview visits, all under 5 seconds, same Chrome Windows combo. Bots or crawlers running from Singapore based infrastructure. Probably inflating my numbers by 12%. I would have never noticed if I hadnt looked at the geo data and sessions together.
Third thing was kind of an accident. While I was digging through all this I noticed my performance had spiked on a couple of days. Out of curiosity I cross referenced those dates with my cohort retention data.
The Mar 9 cohort that signed up during that performance spike had a 2.2% week 1 retention. The Mar 2 cohort when everything was normal had 26.3%. Same product, same onboarding, same everything. The only difference was that half the Mar 9 users were probably staring at a blank screen and bouncing before the page even rendered.
I would have spent weeks trying to figure out why that cohort churned. Blaming the onboarding, the copy, the pricing. Turns out it was just a slow page.
The thing that bugs me most is that in most setups these metrics live on completely different screens. Your traffic data is in one tool, your performance data is somewhere else, your retention is in a third place. You would have to manually line up the dates to even notice the correlation. Most people never would.
Anyway three things I am taking away from this:
Direct over 30% is not a channel report, it is a data quality problem. If you are not investigating what is hiding in there you are making decisions on incomplete data.
Bot traffic from cloud regions like Singapore will quietly inflate everything if you dont filter it. Especially on smaller sites where a few dozen fake sessions actually move the percentages.
Performance and retention need to be visible together. If your performance drops and your retention drops the same week and you can't see both on one screen, you will blame the wrong thing every time.
Curious what your Direct percentage looks like. Anyone else tried to actually break down what is actually hiding in there?
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