at least 18% of what gets labeled as “direct traffic” is not actually direct traffic. That’s just the bucket analytics providers throw stuff into when they can’t classify it any other way. How do they know this? By looking closer at some of this so-called “direct traffic.” A lot of the pages had URLs three levels deep. Did someone really type that URL in by hand? They most likely were sent from somewhere.

What I think is the most useful about this report is that you can click on one of the search-related traffic sources (YouTube Search or Google Search) to get a report of the keywords used to find your channel. For example, the screenshot below shows the individual keywords that someone used to find my client’s YouTube channel on Google Search

In addition to looking for evidence of time travelers online, the researchers also reached out to any potential time travelers directly by writing a post on an online message board asking people from the future to tweet using one of two pre-specified hashtags before a certain date that had already occurred. The hashtags (#ICanChangeThePast2 and #ICannotChangeThePast2) were aimed at letting time travelers tell the researchers about the nature of time travel and whether actions taken while traveling in the past can change events in the future.

device should definitely be a consideration when you create and share content on the social web. Think carefully about the physical context of how people will read your content! If you’re making a tablet application, make sure you test it with someone late at night lying in bed, and if you’re making an early-morning newsletter, you know exactly what time and device to target it at.