More accurate Traffic Sources

I like Clicky for the more accurate numbers and better layout of stats and cookies. But I've noticed an outstanding amount of traffic sources that are passed off as direct/bookmark. I've checked those stats against GA but there are quite a few traffic sources that are not direct but from sources like iconfactory.com(twitteriffic), tumblr. Just wondering what falls under direct? would opening from twitter desktop clients (opens in a new browser window) count as direct? Is it possible to be more accurate?

+1

I also noticed that quite often I can see the referring site in the Spy, yet I can't see it anywhere else for the same user. Right now, every time I get a mail that somebody purchased my app I quickly open Spy in order to check out where that user came from as I know that there is a big chance that I won't be able to find it out later.

so spy gets more accurate data? shouldn't it be translated into the normal stats?

Yes people coming through twitter clients would show up as direct, except twitterific since it spoofs the referrer.

Spy shows more referrers than the normal stats because once the data hits the database, we only log the referrer for the first action of a visit. Almost every other analytics service will log every referrer from a single session - which are often times duplicates. We used to be work that way too but it greatly inflates your referrer stats. A very common behavior is for aomeone to search for something, go to your site, hit back, click on another result perhaps, click back,t hen go to your site again. Sometimes as many as 5 or 10 times. Other anaytics services will count this duplicate referrer, but we don't, so our referrer stats should be much more accurate as to how many true referrers you had.

The only downside is when a visitor has multiple unique referrers from one session. This is very rare but I have seen it happen, so in this case we would only count the first one. But it is very rare to see that so we're not missing much there.

So each unique ip would only log one referral even if there were multiple referrals?

Comparing my GA and Clicky, Clicky missed iconfactory.com, two visits from another tumblr site. and the traffic source countries were different.

Its making me really confused.

Hello, How do you see how many Fist time visiters have come to the site..?

I have a question very related to this discussion. Almost all my traffic comes from Google search. Why are my stats showing 60%+ being direct traffic? That is not accurate nor true as almost 100% of my visitors are searching in Google to find the site. Why is that not showing under search engines etc? Is there anything I would need to update to get more accurate traffic source results?