Direct navigation describes the method individuals use to navigate the Internet in order to arrive at specific websites. Direct navigation is a new, loosely defined term which is generally understood to include type-in traffic and bookmarked traffic. This involves an internet user navigating to a website directly through the website address bar, bypassing any online search engines and navigating directly to the domain.
For example: if you are looking for hotels in Iceland, you probably will type www.HotelsinIceland.com directly in your broswer instead of visiting a search engine. If you already know the domain name, you don't need a search engine.
WebSideStory has recently published a report illustrating that direct navigation traffic, converts into sales for advertisers at a rate twice that of search engines. Specifically, the Q4 2005 study of internet traffic, revealed that direct navigation traffic such as browser type-in traffic, bookmarks of existing sites and visits to existing, known website domain names converts into sales for advertisers at 4.23% of total visits compared to 2.3% for product and service related searches performed via the search box at search engines such as Google and Yahoo.
InformationStart Internet Concepts B.V., a Dutch Internet Company, owns, in conjunction with her business partners, more than 5.000 domain names based on direct navigation.
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