You’ve probably got a point *if* the domain name is typed in.

I’ve just been looking at some Google Analytics data for a site or two and “direct traffic” makes up for only 15% of all referrers. As far as I’m aware there isn’t a way of differentiating bookmarked domains from those typed in into the address bar (ie both will appear as “direct traffic”), but I’d be willing to bet that the majority of this 15% are bookmarks, and not typed.

Watching my wife on the web last night (and making an assumption that she is a typical user – not likely to stand up to much examination, I know, but…) and even with the most commonly visited sites – the ones she absolutely *will* know the domain name for (facebook, gmail, photobox…) she still does what I reckon most users do: has google set as homepage, goes there, types “gmail” / “facebook” / “photobox” and then clicks on first result.

I do it too, only I’m slightly more geeky in that I tend to have firefox shortcuts set up for the common sites I visit. But I’m not most users.